The Idea Of A Christian Society

THE IDEA OF A
CHRISTIAN SOCIETY

THE IDEA OF A
CHRISTIAN SOCIETY

BY

T. S. ELIOT

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London

FIRST PUBLISHED IN OCTOBER MCMXXXIX
BY FABER AND FABER LIMITED
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PREFACE

T he three lectures which, with some revision and
division, are here printed, were delivered in March
1939 at the invitation of the Master and Fellows of Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge, on the Boutwood Foundation.
I wish to express my thanks to the Master and Fellows for
this honour and privilege. The notes I have added while
preparing the lectures for press.

My point of departure has been the suspicion that the
current terms in which we discuss international affairs and
political theory may only tend to conceal from us the real
issues of contemporary civilisation. As I have chosen to
consider such a large problem, it should be obvious that the
following pages can have but little importance by them-
selves, and that they can only be of use if taken as an
individual contribution to a discussion which must occupy
many minds for a long time to come. To aim at originality
would be an impertinence: at most, this essay can be only
an original arrangement of ideas which did not belong to
me before and which must become the property of who-
ever can use them. I owe a great deal to conversations with
certain friends whose minds are engrossed by these and
similar problems: to make specific acknowledgement
might have the effect of imputing to these friends an incon-
venient responsibility for my own faults of reasoning.

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THR IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
But I owe a great deal also to a number of recent books: for
instance, to Mr. Christopher Dawson’s Beyond Politics, to
Mr. Middleton Murry’s The Price of Leadership, and to
writings of the Revd. V. A. Demant (whose Religious
Prospect has appeared too recently for me to have made use
of it). And I am deeply indebted to the works of Jacques
Maritain, especially his Humanisme integral.

I trust that the reader will understand from the beginning
that this book does not make any plea for a ‘religious re-
vival’ in a sense with which we are already familiar. That is
a task for which I. am incompetent, and the term seems to
me to imply a possible separation of religious feeling frojn
religious thinking which I do not accept — or which I do
not find acceptable for our present difficulties. An anony-
mous writer has recently observed in The New English
Weekly (July 13, 1939) that

‘men have lived by spiritual institutions (of some kind)
in every society, and also by political institutions and,
indubitably, by economic activities. Admittedly, they
have, at different periods, tended to put their trust mainly
in one of the three as the real cement of society, but at
no time have they wholly excluded the others, because
it is impossible to do so.’

This is an important, and in its context valuable, dis-
tinction; but it should be clear that what I am concerned
with here is not spiritual institutions in their separated
aspect, but the organisation of values, and a direction of
religious thought which must inevitably proceed to a
criticism of political and economic systems.

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THE IDEA OF A
CHRISTIAN SOCIETY

I

T he fact that a problem will certainly take a long time
to solve, and that it will demand the attention of
many minds for several generations, is no justification for
postponing the study. And, in times of emergency, it may
prove in the long run that the problems we have postponed
or ignored, rather than those we have failed to attack
successfully, will return to plague us. Our difficulties of
the moment must always be dealt with somehow: but our
permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.
The subject with which I am concerned in the following
pages is one to which I am convinced we ought to turn
our attention now, if we hope ever to be relieved of
the immediate perplexities that fill our minds. It is urgent
because it is fundamental; and its urgency is the reason for
a person like myself attempting to address, on a subject be-
yond his usual scope, that public which is likely to read
what he writes on other subjects. This is a subject which I
could, no doubt, handle much better were I a profound
scholar in any of several fields. But I am not writing for
scholars, but for people like myself; some defects may be
compensated by some advantages; and what one must be
judged by, scholar or no, is not particularised knowledge

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THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
but one’s total harvest of thinking, feeling, living and ob-
serving human beings.

While the practice of poetry need not in itself confer wis-
dom or accumulate knowledge, it ought at least to train the
mind in one habit of universal value: that of analysing the
meaning s of words: of those that one employs oneself, as
well as the words of others. In using the term ‘Idea’ of a
Christian Society I do not mean primarily a concept de-
rived from the study of any societies which we may choose
to call Christian; I mean something that can only be found
in an understanding of the end to which a Christian Society,
to deserve the name, must be directed. I do not limit the
application of the term to a perfected Christian Society on
earth; and I do not comprehend in it societies merely be-
cause some profession of Christian faith, or some vestige of
Christian practice, is retained. My concern with contempo-
rary society, accordingly, will not be primarily with speci-
fic defects, abuses or injustices but with the question, what
— if any — is the ‘idea’ of the society in which we live? to
what end is it arranged?

The Idea of a Christian Society is one which we can
accept or reject; but if we are to accept it, we must treat
Christianity with a great deal more intellectual respect than
is our wont; we must treat it as being for the individual a
matter primarily of thought and not of feeling. The con-
sequences of such an attitude are too serious to be acceptable
to everybody: for when the Christian faith is not only
felt, but thought, it has practical results which may be
inconvenient. For to see the Christian faith in this way
— and to see it in this way is not necessarily to accept

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THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY

it, but only to understand the real issues — is to see
that the difference between the Idea of a Neutral Society
(which is that of the society in which we live at present)
and the Idea of a Pagan Society (such as the upholders of
democracy abominate) is, in the long run, of minor im-
portance. I am not at this moment concerned with the means
for bringing a Christian Society into existence; I amnoteven
primarily concerned with making it appear d esirable ; but I
am very much concerned with making clear its difference
from the kind of society in which we are now living. Now,
to understand the society in which he lives, must be to the
interest of every conscious thinking person. The current
terms in which we describe our society, the contrasts with
other societies by which we — of the ‘Western Democracies"
— eulogise it, only operate to deceive and stupefy us. To
speak of ourselves as a Christian Society, in contrast to that
of Germany or Russia, is an abuse of terms. We mean only
that we have a society in which no one is penalised for the
formal profession of Christianity; but we conceal from our-
selves the unpleasant knowledge of the real values by which
we live. We conceal from ourselves, moreover, the simi-
larity of our society to those which we execrate: for we
should have to admit, if we recognised the similarity, that
the foreigners do better. I suspect that in our loathing of 1
totalitarianism, there is infused a good deal of admiration
for its efficiency.

The political philosopher of the present time, even when
he is a Christian himself, is not usually concerned with the
possible structure of a Christian state. He is occupied with
the possibility of a just State in general, and when he is not

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THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
an adherent of one or another secular system, is inclined to
accept our present system as one to be improved, but not
fundamentally altered. Theological writers have more to
say that is relevant to my subject. I am not alluding to those
writers who endeavour to infuse a vague, and sometimes
debased, Christian spirit into the ordinary conduct of
affairs; or to those who endeavour, at m oments of em er-
gency, to apply Christian principles to particular political
situations. Relevant to my subject are the writings of the
Christian sociologists — those writers who criticise our
economic system in the light of Christian ethics. Their
work consists in proclaiming in gener al, and demonsttating
in particula r, the incompatibility of Christian principle and
a great deal of our social practice. They appeal to the spirit
of justice and humanity with which most of us profess to be
inspired; they appeal also to the practical reason, by demon-
strating that much in our system is not only iniquitous, but in
the long run unworkable and conducive to disaster. Many
of the changes which such writers advocate, while deducible
from Christian principles, can recommend themselves to
' any intelligent and disinterested person, and do not require
a Christian society to carry them into effect, or Christian
belief to render them acceptable: though they are changes
which would make it more possible for the individual
Christian to live out his Christianity. I am here concerned
only secondarily with the changes in economic organisa-
tion, and only secondarily with the life of the devout Chris-
tian: my primary interest is a change in our social attitude,
such a change only as could bring about anything worthy to
be called a Christian Society. That such a change would com-

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THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
pel changes in our organisation of industry and commerce
and financial credit, that it would facilitate, where it now
impedes, the life of devotion for those who are capable of
it, I feel certain. But my point of departure is different from
that of the sociologists and economists; though I depend
upon them for enlightenment, and a test of my Christian
Society would be that it should bring about such reforms
as they propose; and though the kind of ‘change of spirit’
which can testify for itself by nothing better than a new re-
vivalistic vocabulary, is a danger against which we must be
always on guard.

My subject touches also upon that of another class of
Christian writer: that of the ecclesiastical controversialists.
The subject of Church and State is, again, not my primary
concern. It is not, except at moments which lend themselves
to newspaper exploitation, a subject in which the general
public takes much interest; and at the moments when the
public’s interest is aroused, the public is never well enough
informed to have the right to an opinion. My subject is a
preliminary to the problem of Church and State: it involves
that problem in its widest terms and in its most general in-
terest. A usual attitude is to take for granted the existing
State, and ask: ‘What Church?’ But before we consider
what should be the relation of Church and State, we
should first ask: What State?’ Is there any sense in which
we can speak of a ‘Christian State’, any sense in which the
State can be regarded as Christian? for even if the nature of
the State be such, that we cannot speak of it in its Idea as
either Christian or non-Christian, yet is it obvious that
actual States may vary to such an extent that the relation of

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THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
the Church, to the State may be anything from overt
hostility to a more or less harmonious cooperation of
different institutions in the same society. What I mean by
the Christian State is not any particular political form, but
whatever State is suitable to a Christian Society, whatever
State a particular Christian Society develops for itself.
Many Christians there are, I know, who do not believe
that a Church in relation to the State is necessary for a
Christian Society; and I shall have to give reasons, in later
pages, for believing that it is. The point to be made at this
stage is that neither the classical English treatises on Church
and State, nor contemporary discussion of the subject, give
me the assistance that I need. For the earlier treatises, and
indeed all up to the present time, assume the existence of a
Christian Society; modem writers sometime assume that
what we have is a pagan society: and it is just these assump-
tions that I wish to question.

Your opinion of what can be done for this country in the
future, and incidentally your opinion of what ought to be
the relations of Church and State, will depend upon the
view you take of the contemporary situation. We can ab-
stract three positive historical points: that at which Chris-
tians are a new minority in a society of positive pagan
traditions — a position which cannot recur within any
future with which we are concerned; the point at which
the whole society can be called Christian, whether in one
body or in a prior or subsequent stage of division into
sects; and finally the point at which practising Christians
must be recognised as a minority (whether static or
di m i n ishing) in a society which has ceased to be Christian.

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THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
Have we reached the third point? Different observers will
give different reports; but I would remark that there are
two points of view for two contexts. The first is that a
society has ceased to be Christian when religious practices
have been abandoned, when behaviour ceases to be regu-
lated by reference to Christian principle, and when in
effect prosperity in this world for the individual or for the
group has become the sole conscious aim. The other point
of view, which is less readily apprehended, is that a society
has not ceased to be Christian until it has become positively
something else. It is my contention that we have to-day a
culture which is mainly negative, but which, so far as it is
positive, is still Christian. I do not think that it can remain
negative, because a negative culture has ceased to be
efficient in a world where economic as well as spiritual
forces are proving the efficiency of cultures which, even
when pagan, are positive; and I believe that the choice be-
fore us is between the formation of a new Christian culture,
and the acceptance of a pagan one. Both involve radical
changes; but I believe that the majority of us, if we could
be faced immediately with all the changes which will only
be accomplisEeH”m several generations, would prefer
Christianity.

I do not expect everyone to agree that our present
organisation and temper of society — which proved, in its
way, highly successful during the nineteenth century — is
‘negative’: many will maintain that British, French and
American civilisation still stands integrally for something
positive. And there are others who will insist, that if our
culture is negative, then a negative culture is the right thing

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THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
to have. There are two distinct arguments to be employed
in rebuttal: one, an argument of principle, that such a cul-
ture is undesirable; the other, a judgment of fact, that it
must disappear anyway. The defenders of the present order
fail to perceive either how far it is vestigial of a positive
Christianity, or how far it has already advanced towards
something else.

There is one class of persons to which one speaks with
difficulty, and another to which one speaks in vain. The
second, more numerous and obstinate than may at first
appear, because it represents a state of mind into which we
are all prone through natural sloth to relapse, consists of
those people who cannot believe that things will ever be
very different from what they are at the moment. From
time to time, under the influence perhaps of some persuasive
writer or speaker, they may have an instant of disquiet or
hope; but an invincible sluggishness of imagination makes
them go on behaving as if nothing would ever change.
Those to whom one speaks with difficulty, but not perhaps
in vain, are the persons who believe that great changes must
come, but are not sure either of what is inevitable, or of
what is probable, or of what is desirable.

What the Western world has stood for — and by that I
mean the terms to which it has attributed sanctity — is
‘Liberalism* and ‘Democracy*. The two terms are not
identical or inseparable. The term ‘Liberalism’ is the more
obviously ambiguous, and is now less in favour; but the
term ‘ Democracy’ is at the height of its popularity . When
a term has become so universally sanctified as ‘democracy’
now is, I begin to wonder whether it means anything, in

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THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY

meaning too many things: it has arrived perhaps at the
position of a Merovingian Emperor, and wherever it is in-
voked, one begins to look for the Major of the Palace.
Some persons have gone so far as to affirm, as something
self-evident, that democracy is the only regime compatible
with Christianity; on the other hand, the word is not aban-
doned by sympathisers with the government of Germany.
If anybody ever attacked democracy, I might discover
what the word meant. Certainly there is a sense in which
Britain and America are more democratic than Germany;
but on the other hand, defenders of the totalitarian system
can make out a plausible case for maintaining that what we
have is not democracy, but financial oligarchy.

Mr. Christopher Dawson considers that ‘what the non-
dictatorial States stand for to-day is not Liberalism but
Democracy’, and goes on to foretell the advent in these
States of a kind of totalitarian democracy. I agree with his
prediction, but if one is considering, not merely the non-
dictatorial States, but the societies to which they belong,
his statement does less than justice to the extent to which
Liberalism still permeates our minds and affects our attitude
towards much of life. That Liberalism may be a tendency
towards something very different from itself, is a possibility
in its nature. For it is something which tends to release
energy rather than accumulate it, to relax, rather than to
fortify. It is a movement not so much defined by its end,
as by its starting point; away from, rather than towards,
something definite. Our point of departure is more real to
us than our destination; and the destination is likely to pre-
sent a very different picture when arrived at, from the

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THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
vaguer image formed in imagination. By destroying tra-
ditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their
natural collective consciousness into individual constituents,
by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substi-
tuting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness
rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified,
by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is
a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that
which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanised or
brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.

It must be evident that I am speaking of Liberalism in a
sense much wider than any which can be fully exemplified
by the history of any political party, and equally in a wider
sense than any in which it has been used in ecclesiastical
controversy. True, the tendency of Liberalism can be more
clearly illustrated in religious history than in politics, where
principle is more diluted by necessity, where observation is
more confused by detail and distracted by reforms each
valid within its own limited reference. In religion, Liberal-
ism may be characterised as a progressive discarding of
elements in historical Christianity which appear superfluous
or obsolete, confounded with practices and abuses which
are legitimate objects of attack. But as its movement is con-
trolled rather by its origin than by any goal, it loses force
after a series of rejections, and with nothing to destroy is
left with nothing to uphold and with nowhere to go. With
religious Liberalism, however, I am no more specifically
concerned than with political Liberalism: I am concerned
with a state of mind which, in certain circumstances, can
become universal and infect opponents as well as defenders.

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THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY

And I shall have expressed myself very ill if I give the im-
pression that I think of Liberalism as something simply to
be rejected and extirpated, as an evil for which there is a
simple alternative. It is a necessary negative element; when
I have said the worst of it, that worst comes only to this,
that a negative element made to serve the purpose of a
positive is objectionable. In the sense in which Liberalism is
contrasted with Conservatism, both can be equally repellent:
if the former can mean chaos, the latter can mean petri-
faction. We are always faced both with the question ‘what
must be destroyed?’ and with the question ‘what must be
preserved?’ and neither Liberalism nor Conservatism,
which are not philosophies and may be merely habits, is
enough to guide us.

In the nineteenth century the Liberal Party had its own
conservatism, and the Conservative Party had its own
liberalism; neither had a political philosophy. To hold a
political philosophy is in fact not the function of a political,
that is, a Parliamentary party: a party with a political
philosophy is a revolutionary party. The politics of political
parties is not my concern. Nor am I concerned with the
politics of a revolutionary party. If a revolutionary party
attains its true end, its political philosophy will, by a process
of growth, become that of a whole culture; if it attains its
more facile end, its political philosophy will be that of a
dominant class or group, in a society in which the majority
will be passive, and the minority oppressed. But a political
philosophy is not merely a formalised system set forth by a
theorist. The permanent value of such treatises as Aristode’s
Politics and Poetics is found at the opposite extreme to any-

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THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
tiling that we can call doctrinaire. Just as his views on drama-
tic poetry were derived from a study of the existing works
of Attic drama, so his political theory was founded on a
perception of the unconscious aims implicit in Athenian
democracy at its best. His limitations are the condition of
his universality; and instead of ingenious theories spun out
of his head, he wrote studies full of universal wisdom.
Thus, what I mean hy a political philosophy is not merely
even the conscious formulation of the ideal aims of a
people, but the substratum of collective temperament,
ways of behaviour and unconscious values which provides
the material for the formulation. What we are seeking is
not a programme for a party, but a wav of life, for a people :
it is this which totalitarianism has sought partly to revive,
and partly to impose by force upon its peoples. Our choice
now is not between one abstract form and another, but be-
tween a pagan, and necessarily stunted culture, and a re-
ligious, and necessarily imperfect culture.

The attitudes and beliefs of Liberalism are destined to
disappear, are already disappearing. They belong to an age
of free exploitation which has passed; and our danger now
is, that the term may come to signify for us only the dis-
order the fruits of which we inherit, and not the permanent
value of the negative element. Out of Liberalism itself
come philosophies which deny it. We do not proceed,
from Liberalism to its apparent end of authoritarian demo-
cracy, at a uniform pace in every respect. There are so
many centres of it — Britain, France, America and the
Dominions — that the development of western society must
proceed more slowly than that of a compact body like Ger-

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THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
many, and its tendencies are less apparent. Furthermore,
those who are the most convinced of the necessity of
itatisme as a control of some activities of life, can be the
loudest professors of libertarianism in others, and insist
upon the preserves of ‘private life’ in which each man may
obey his own convictions or follow his own whim: while
imperceptibly this domain of ‘private life’ becomes smaller
and smaller, and may eventually disappear altogether. It is
possible that a wave of terror of the consequences of de-
population might lead to legislation having the effect of
compulsory breeding.

If, then, Liberalism disappears from the philosophy of
life of a people, what positive is left? We are left only with
the term ‘democracy’, a term which, for the present genera-
tion, still has a Liberal connotation of ‘freedom’. But totali-
tarianism can retain the terms ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’
and give them its own meaning: and its right to them is not
so easily disproved as minds inflamed by passion suppose.
We are in danger of finding ourselves with nothing to
stand for except a dislike of everything maintained by Ger-
many and/or Russia: a dislike which, being a compost of
newspaper sensations and prejudice, can have two results,
at the same time, which appear at first incompatible. It may
lead us to reject possible improvements, because we should
owe them to the example of one or both of these countries;
and it may equally well lead us to be mere imitators h re-
borns, in making us adopt uncritically almost any attitude
which a foreign nation rejects.

We are living at present in a kind of doldrum s between
opposing winds of doctrine, in a period in which one poli-

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THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
deal philosophy has lost its cogency for behaviour, though
it is still the only one in which public speech can be framed.
This is very bad for the English language; it is this disorder
(for which we are all to blame) and not individual insin-
cerity, which is responsible for the hollowness of many
political and ecclesiastical utterances. You have only to
examine the mass of newspaper leading articles, the mass of
political exhortation, to appreciate the fact that good prose
cannot be written by a people without convictions. The
fundamental objection to fascist doctrine, the one which we
conceal from ourselves because it might condemn ourselves
as well, is that it is pagan. There are other objections too,
in the political and economic sphere, but they are not ob-
jections that we can make with dignity until we set our own
affairs in order. There are still other objections, to oppres-
sion and violence and cruelty, but however strongly we
feel, these are objections to means and not to ends. It is true
that we sometimes use the word ‘pagan’, and in the same
context refer to ourselves as ‘Christian’. But we always
dodge the real issue. Our newspapers have done all they
could with the red herring of the ‘German national religion’,
an eccentricity which is after all no odder than some cults
held in Anglo-Saxon countries: this ‘German national re-
ligion’ is comforting in that it persuades us that we have a
Christian civilisation; it helps to disguise the fact that our
aims, like Germany’s, are materialistic. And the last thing
we should like to do would be to examine the ‘Christianity’
which, in such contexts as this, we say we keep.

If we have got so far as accepting the belief that the only
alternative to a progressive and insidious adaptation to

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THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
totalitarian worldliness for which the pace is already set, is
to aim at a Christian society, we need to consider both
what kind of a society we have at this time, and what a
Christian society would be like. We should also be quite
sure of what we want: if your real ideals are those of
materialistic efficiency, then the sooner you know your
own mind, and face the consequences, the better. Those
who, either complacently or despairingly, suppose that the
aim of Christianisation is chimerical, I am not here attempt-
ing to convert. To those who realise what a well organised
pagan society would mean for us, there is nothing to say.
But it is as well to remember that the imposition of a
pagan theory of the State does not necessarily mean a
wholly pagan society. A compromise between the theory
of the State and the tradition of society exists in Italy,
a country which is still mainly agricultural and Catholic.
The more highly industrialised the country, the more
easily a materialistic philosophy will flourish in it, and the
more deadly that philosophy will be. Britain has been
highly industrialised longer than any other country. And
the tendency of unlimited industrialism is to create bodies
of men and women — of all classes — 4 etac ked from tradi-
tion, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass sug-
gestion: in other words, a mob. And a mob will be no less
a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well
disciplined.

The Liberal notion that religion was a matter of private
belief and of conduct in private life, and that there is no
reason why Christians should not be able to accommodate
themselves to any world which treats them good-naturedly,

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THE IDEA OP A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
is becoming less and. less tenable. This notion would seem
to have become accepted gradually, as a false inference from
the subdivision of English Christianity into sects, and the
happy results of universal toleration. The reason why mem-
bers of different communions have been able to rub along
together, is that in the greater part of the ordinary business
of life they have shared the same assumptions about be-
haviour. When they have been wrong, they have been
wrong together. We have less excuse than our ancestors
for un-Christian conduct, because the growth of an un-
Christian society about us, its more obvious intrusion
upon our lives, has been breaking down the comfortable
distinction between public and private morality. The pro-
blem of leading a Christian life in a non-Christian society is
now very present to us, and it is a very different problem
from that of the accommodation between an Established
Church and dissenters. It is not merely the problem of a
minority in a society of individuals holding an alien belief.
It is the problem constituted by our implication in a net-
work of institutions from which we cannot dissociate our-
selves: institutions the operation of which appears no longer
neutral, but non-Christian. And as for the Christian who
is not conscious of his dilemma — and he is in the majority —
he is becoming more and more de-Christianised by all sorts
of unconscious pressure: paganism holds all the most valu-
able advertising space. Anything like Christian traditions
'transmitted from generation to generation within the
family must disappear, and the small body of Christians will
consist entirely of adult recruits. I am saying no thing at this
point that has not been said before by others, but it is rele-

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vant. I am not concerned with the problem of Christians
as a persecuted minority. When the Christian is treated as
an enemy of the State, his course is very much harder, but
it is simpler. I am concerned with the dangers to the tolera-
ted minority; and in the modern world, it may turn out
that the most intolerable thing for Christians is to be
tolerated.

To attempt to make the prospect of a Christian society
immediately attractive to those who see no prospect of de-
riving direct personal benefit from it, would be idle; even
the majority of professing Christians may shrink from it.
No scheme for a change of society can be made to appear
immediately palatable, except by falsehood, until society
has become so desperate that it will accept any change. A
Christian society only becomes acceptable after you have
fairly examined the alternatives. We might, of course,
merely sink into an apathetic decline: without faith, and
therefore without faith in ourselves; without a philosophy
of life, either Christian or pagan; and without art. Or we
might get a ‘totalitarian democracy’, different but having
much in common with other pagan societies, because we
shall have changed step by step in order to keep pace with
them: a state of affairs in which we shall have regimentation
and conformity, without respect for the needs of the in-
dividual soul; th e Puritan ism of a hygienic . moral ity in the
interest of efficiency; uniformity of opinion through propa-
ganda, and art only encouraged when it flatters the official
doctrines of the time. To those who can imagine, and are
therefore repelled by, such a prospect, one can assert that
the only possibility of control and balance is a religious

23

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
control and balance; that the only hopeful course for a
socie

in the arts of civilisation, is to become Christian. That
prospect involves, at least, discipline, inconvenience and
discomfort: but here as hereafter the alternative to hell is
purgatory.

24

II

M y thesis has been, simply, that a liberalised or nega-
tive condition of society must either proceed into
a gradual decline of which we can see no end, or (whether
as a result of catastrophe or not) reform itself into a positive
shape which is likely to be effectively secular. We need
not assume that this secularism will approximate closely to
any system in the past or to any that can now be observed
in order to be apprehensive about it: the Anglo-Saxons dis-
play a capacity for diluting their religion, probably in excess
of that of any other race. But unless we are content with
the prospect of one or the other of these issues, the only
possibility left is that of a positive Christian society. The
third will only commend itself to those who agree in their
view of the present situation, and who can see that a
thoroughgoing secularism would be objectionable, in its
consequences, even to those who attach no positive im-
portance to the survival of Christianity for its own sake.

I am not investigating the possible lines of action by
which such a Christian society could be brought into being.
I shall confine myself to a slight outline of what I conceive
to be essential features of this society, bearing in mind that
it can neither be mediaeval in form, nor be modelled on the
seventeenth century or any previous age. In what sense, if
any, can we speak of a ‘Christian State’? I would ask to be

25

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
allowed to use the following working distinctions: the
Christian State, the Christian Community, and the Com-
munity of Christians, as elements of the Christian Society.

I conceive then of the Christian State as of the Christian
Society under the aspect of legislation, public administra-
tion, legal tradition, and form. Observe that at this point I
am not approaching the problem of Church and State ex-
cept with the question: with what kind of State can the
Church have a relation? By this I mean a relation of the
kind which has hitherto obtained in England; which is
neither merely reciprocal tolerance, nor a Concordat. The
latter seems to me merely a kind of compromise, of doubt-
ful durability, resting on a dubious division of authority,
and often a popular division of loyalty; a compromise
which implies perhaps a hope on the part of the rulers of
the State that their rule will outlast Christianity, and a
faith on the part of the Church that it will survive any
particular form of secular organisation. A relation between
Church and State such as is, I think, implied in our use of
the term, implies that the State is in some sense Christian.
It must be clear that I do not mean by a Christian State one
in which the rulers are chosen because of their qualifications,
still less their eminence, as Christians. A regiment of Saints
is apt to be too uncomfortable to last. I do not deny that
some advantages may accrue from persons in authority,
in a Christian State, being Christians. Even in the present
conditions, that sometimes happens; but even if, in the
present conditions, all persons in positions of the highest
authority were devout and orthodox Christians, we should
not expect to see very much difference in the conduct of
26

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
affairs. The Christian and the unbeliever do not, and can-
not, behave very differently in the exercise of office; for it is
the general ethos of the people they have to govern, not
their own piety, that determines the behaviour of poli-
ticians. One may even accept F. S. Oliver’s affirmation —
following Buelow, following Disraeli — that real statesmen
are inspired by nothing else than their instinct for power
and their love of country. It is not primarily the Christianity
of the statesmen that matters, but their being confined, by
the temper and traditions of the people which they rule, to
a Christian framework within which to realise their am-
bitions and advance the prosperity and prestige of their
country. They may frequently perform un-Christian acts;
they must never attempt to defend their actions on un-
Christian principles.

The rulers and would-be rulers of modern states may be
divided into three kinds, in a classification which cuts
across the division of fascism, communism and democracy.
There are such as have taken over or adapted some philo-
sophy, as of Marx or Aquinas. There are those who, com-
bining invention with eclecticism have devised their own
philosophy — not usually distinguished by either the pro-
fundity or the consistency one expects of a philosophy of
life — and there are those who pursue their tasks without
appearing to have any philosophy at all. I should not ex-
pect the rulers of a Christian State to be philosophers, or to
be able to keep before their minds at every moment of de-
cision the maxim that the life of virtue is the purpose of
human society — virtuosa . . . vita est congregationis humanae
finis; but they would neither be self-educated, nor have

27

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
been submitted in their youth merely to that system of
miscellaneous or specialised instruction which passes for
education: they would have received a Christian education.
The purpose of a Christian education would not be merely
to make men and women pious Christians: a system which
aimed too rigidly at this end alone would become only
obscurantist. A Christian education would primarily train
people to be able to think in Christian categories, though it
could not compel belief and would not impose the necessity
for insincere profession of belief. What the rulers believed,
would be less important than the beliefs to which they
would be obliged to conform. And a skeptical or indifferent
statesman, working within a Christian frame, might be
more effective than a devout Christian statesman obliged
to conform to a secular frame. For he would be required
to design his policy for the government of a Christian
Society.

The relation of the Christian State, the Christian Com-
munity, and the Community of Christians, may be looked
at in connexion with the problem of belief. Among the men
of state, you would have as a minimum, conscious con-
formity of behaviour. In the Christian Community that
they ruled, the Christian faith would be ingrained, but it
requires, as a minimum, only a largely unconscious be-
haviour; and it is only from the much smaller number of
conscious human beings, the Community of Christians,
that one would expect a conscious Christian life on its
highest social level.

For the great mass of humanity whose attention is occu-
pied mostly by their direct relation to the soil, or the sea, or

28

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
the machine, and to a small number of persons, pleasures
and duties, two conditions are required. The first is that, as
their capacity for thinking about the objects of faith is small,
their Christianity may be almost wholly realised in be-
haviour: both in their customary and periodic religious
observances, and in a traditional code of behaviour towards
their neighbours. The second is that, while they should have
some perception of how far their lives fall short of Christian
ideals, their religious and social life should form for them
a natural whole, so that the difficulty of behaving as Chris-
tians should not impose an intolerable strain. These two
conditions are really the same differently stated; they are
far from being realised to-day.

The traditional unit of the Christian Community in
England is the parish. I am not here concerned with the
problem of how radically this system must be modified to
suit a future state of things. The parish is certainly in decay,
from several causes of which the least cogent is the division
into sects: a much more important reason is urbanisation —
in which I am including also sub- urbanisation, and all the
causes and effects of urbanisation. How far the parish must
be superseded will depend largely upon our view of the
necessity of accepting the causes which tend to destroy it.
In any case, the parish will serve my purpose as an example
of community unit. For this unit must not be solely reli-
gious, and not solely social; nor should the individual be a
member of two separate, or even overlapping units, one
religious and the other social. The unitary community
should be religious-social, and it must be one in which all
classes, if you have classes, have their centre of interest.

29

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
That is a state of affairs which is no longer wholly realised
except in very primitive tribes indeed.

It is a matter of concern not only in this country, but has
been mentioned with concern by the late Supreme Pontiff,
speaking not of one country but of all civilised countries,
that the masses of the people have become increasingly
alienated from Christianity. In an industrialised society like
that of England, I am surprised that the people retains as
much Christianity as it does. For the great majority of the
people — and I am not here thinking of social classes, but of
intellectual strata — religion must be primarily a matter of
behaviour and habit, must be integrated with its social life,
with its business and its pleasures; and the specifically re-
ligious emotions must be a kind of extension and sanctifica-
tion of the domestic and social emotions. Even for the most
; highly developed and conscious individual, living in the
world, a consciously Christian direction of thought and
feeling can only occur at particular moments during the
day and during the week, and these moments themselves
recur in consequence of formed habits; to be conscious,
Iwithout remission, of a Christian and a non-Christian
alternative at moments of choice, imposes a very great
istrain. The mass of the population, in a Christian society,
should not be exposed to a way of life in which there is too
sharp and frequent a conflict between whatis easy for them or
what their circumstances dictate and what is Christian. The
compulsion to live in such a way that Christian behaviour
is only possible in a restricted number of situations, is a
very powerful force against Christianity; for behaviour is
as potent to affect belief, as belief to affect behaviour.

30

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
I am not presenting any idyllic picture of the rural parish,
either present or past, in taking as a norm, the idea of a
small and mostly self-contained group attached to the soil
and having its interests centred in a particular place, with a
kind of unity which may be designed, but which also has
to grow through generations. It is the idea, or ideal, of a
community small enough to consist of a nexus of direct
personal relationships, in which all iniquities and turpitudes
will take the simple and easily appreciable form of wrong
relations between one person and another. But at present
not even the smallest community, unless so primitive as to
present objectionable features of another kind, is so simpli-
fied as this; and I am not advocating any complete rever-
sion to any earlier state of things, real or idealised. The
example appears to offer no solution to the problem of
industrial, urban and suburban life which is that of the
majority of the population. In its religious organisation, we
may say that Christendom has remained fixed at the stage
of development suitable to a simple agricultural and pisca-
torial society, and that modern material organisation — or
if 'organisation’ sounds too complimentary, we will say
'complication — has produced a world for which Christian
social forms are imperfectly adapted. Even if we agree on
this point, there are two simplifications of the problem
which are suspect. One is to insist that the only salvation
for society is to return to a simpler mode of life, scrapping
all the constructions of the modem world that we can
bring ourselves to dispense with. This is an extreme state-
ment of the neo-Ruskinian view, which was put forward
with much vigour by the late A. J. Penty. When one con-

31

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
sidcrs the large amount of determination in social struc-
ture, this policy appears Utopian: if such a way of life ever
comes to pass, it will be — as may well happen in the long
run — from natural causes, and not from the moral will of
men. The other alternative is to accept the modern world
as it is and simply try to adapt Christian social ideals to it.
The latter resolves itself into a mere doctrine of expedi-
ency; and is a surrender of the faith that Christianity itself
can play any part in shaping social forms. And it does not
require a Christian attitude to perceive that the modem
system of society has a great deal in it that is inherently bad.

We now reach a point from which there is a course that
I do not propose to take; and as it is an obvious course, and
to some may appear to be the main thoroughfare, I ought
to explain as briefly as I can why I do not propose to take
it. We are accustomed to make the distinction (though in
practice we are frequently confused) between the evil
which is present in human nature at all times and in all
circumstances, and the evil in particular institutions at
particular times and places, and which, though attributable
to some individuals rather than others, or traceable to the
cumulative deflection of the wills of many individuals
throughout several generations, cannot at any moment be
fastened upon particular persons. If we make the mistake
of assuming that this kind of evil results from causes wholly
beyond the human will, then we are liable to believe that
only other non-human causes can change it. But we are
equally likely to take another line, and to place all our hopes
in the replacement of our machinery. Nevertheless, the
lines of thought, which I am doing no more than indicate,

32

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
for the realisation of a Christian society, must lead us
inevitably to face such problems as the hypertrophy of the
motive of Profit into a social ideal, the distinction between
the use of natural resources and their exploitation, the use
of labour and its exploitation, the advantages unfairly
accruing to the trader in contrast to the primary producer,
the misdirection of the financial machine, the iniquity of
usury, and other features of a commercialised society which
must be scrutinised on Christian principles. In ignoring
these problems, I am not taking refuge in a mere admission
of incompetence, though the suspicion that I am incom-
petent might operate against the acceptance of any observa-
tions that I made; nor am I simply resigning them to the
supposed technical authorities, for that would be a sur-
render of the primacy of ethics. My point is that, while
there is a considerable measure of agreement that certain
things are wrong, the question of how they should be put
right is so extremely controversial, that any proposal is
immediately countered by a dozen others; and in this con-
text, attention would be concentrated on the imperfections
of my proposals, and away from my main concern, the end
to be attained. I confine myself therefore to the assertion,
which I think few will dispute, that a great deal of the
machinery of modern life is merely a sanction for un-
Christian aims, that it is not only hostile to the conscious
pursuit of the Christian life in the world by the few, but to
the maintenance of any Christian society of the world. We
must abandon the notion that the Christian should be con-
tent with freedom of cultus, and with suffering no worldy
disabilities on account of his faith. However bigoted the

33

c

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY

announcement may sound, the Christian can be satisfied
with nothing less than a Qhristian organisation of society —
which is not the same thing as a society consisting exclusively
of devout Christians. It would be a society in which the
naturalend of man — virtue and well-being in community —
is acknowledged for all, and the s upernatural end — beati-
tude — for those who have the eyes to see it.

I do not wish, however, to abandon my previous point,
that a Christian community is one in which there is a
unified religious-social code of behaviour. It should not
be necessary for the ordinary individual to be wholly
conscious of what elements are distinctly religious and
Christian, and what are merely social and identified with
his religion by no logical implication. I am not requiring
that the community should contain more 'good Christians’
than one would expect to find under favourable conditions.
The religious life of the people would be largely a matter
of behaviour and conformity; social customs would take on
religious sanctions; there would no doubt be many irrele-
vant accretions and local emphases and observances —
which, if they went too far in eccentricity or superstition,
it would be the business of the Church to correct, but
which otherwise could make for social tenacity and co-
herence. The traditional way of life of the community
would not be imposed by law, would have no sense of
outward constraint, and would not be the result merely
of the sum of individual belief and understanding.

The rulers, I have said, will, qua rulers, accept Christian-
ity not simply as their own faith to guide their actions,
but as the system under which they are to govern. The

34

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
people will accept it as a matter of behaviour and habit.
In the abstraction which I have erected, it is obvious that
the tendency of the State is toward expediency that may
become cynical manipulation, the tendency of the people
toward intellectual lethargy and superstition. We need
therefore what I have called ‘the Community of Chris tians ’,
by which I mean, not local groups, and not the Church in
any one of its senses, unless we call it ‘the Church within
the Church’. These will be the consciously and thought-
fully practising Christians, especially those of intellectual
and spiritual superiority. It will be remarked at once that
this category bears some resemblance to what Coleridge
has called ‘the clerisy’ — a term recently revived, and given
a somewhat different application, by Mr. Middleton
Murry. I think that my ‘Community of Christians’ is
somewhat different from either use of the term ‘derisy’.
The content which Coleridge gave to the term, certainly,
has been somewhat voided by time. You will remember
that Coleridge included in the extension of meaning three
classes: the universities and great schools of learning, the
parochial pastorate, and the local schoolmasters. Coleridge’s
conception of the clerical function, and of its relation to
education was formed in a world that has since been
strangely altered: his insistence that clergy should be ‘in the
rule married men and heads of families’ and his dark
references to a foreign ecclesiastical power, now sound
merely quaint; and he quite failed to recognise the enor-
mous value which monastic orders can and should have
in the community. The term which I use is meant to be at
once wider and more restricted. In the field of education

35

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
it is obvious that the conformity to Christian belief and
the possession of Christian knowledge, can no longer be
taken for granted; nor can the supremacy of the theologian
be either expected or imposed in the same way. In any
future Christian society that I can conceive, the educational
system will be formed according to Christian presupposi-
tions of what education — as distinct from mere instruction
— is for; but the personnel will inevitably be mixed: one
may even hope that the mixture may be a benefit to its
intellectual vitality. The mixture will include persons of
exceptional ability who may be indifferent or disbelieving;
there will be room for a proportion of other persons pro-
fessing other faiths than Christianity. The limitations im-
posed upon such persons would be similar to those imposed
by social necessity upon the politician who, without being
able to believe the Christian faith, yet has abilities to offer
in the public service, with which his country could ill
dispense.

It would be still more rash of me to embark upon a criti-
cism of the contemporary ideals of education, than it is for
me to venture to criticise politics; but it is not impertinent
to remark upon the close relationship of educational theory
and political theory. One would indeed be surprised to find
the educational system and the political system of any
country in complete disaccord; and what I have said about
the negative character of our political philosophy should
suggest a parallel criticism of our education, not as it is
found in practice here or there, but in the assumptions about
the nature and purpose of education which tend to affect
practice throughout the country. And I do not need to re-

36

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
mind you that a pagan totalitarian government is hardly
likely to leave education to look after itself, or to refrain
from interfering with the traditional methods of the oldest
institutions: of some of the results abroad of such inter-
ference on the most irrelevant grounds we are quite well
aware. There is likely to be, everywhere, more and more
pressure of circumstance towards adapting educational
ideals to political ideals, and in the one as in the other
sphere, we have only to choose between a higher and a
lower rationalisation. In a Christian Society education
must be religious, not in the sense that it will be adminis-
tered by ecclesiastics, still less in the sense that it will exercise
pressure, or attempt to instruct everyone in theology, but
in the sense that its aims will be directed by a Christian
philosophy of life. It will no longer be merely a term com-
prehending a variety of unrelated subjects undertaken for
special purposes or for none at all.

My Community of Christians, then, in contrast to Coler-
idge’s clerisy, could hardly include the whole of the teach-
ing body. On the other hand, it would include, besides
many of the laity engaged in various occupations, many,
but not all, of the clergy. A national clergy must of course
include individual priests of different intellectual types and
levels; and, as I suggested before, belief has a vertical as well
as a horizontal measurement: to answer fully the question
‘What does A believe?’ one must know enough about A to
have some notion of the level on which he is capable of be-
lieving anything. The Community of Christians — a body
of very nebulous outline — would contain both clergy and
laity of superior intellectual and/or spiritual gifts. And it

37

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
would include some of those who are ordinarily spoken of,
not always with flattering intention, as ‘intellectuals’.

That culture and the cultivation of philosophy and the
arts should be confined to the cloister would be a decline
into a Dark Age that I shudder to contemplate; on the
other hand the segregation of lay ‘intellectuals’ into a world
of their own, which very few ecclesiastics or politicians
either penetrate or have any curiosity about, is not a pro-
gressive situation either. A good deal of waste seems to me
to occur through pure ignorance; a great deal of ingenuity
is expended on half-baked philosophies, in the absence of
any common background of knowledge. We write for our
friends — most of whom are also writers — or for our pupils
— most of whom are going to be writers; or we aim at
a hypothetical popular audience which we do not know
and which perhaps does not exist. The result in any case,
is apt to be a refined provincial crudity. What are the
most fruitful social conditions for the production of works
of the first order, philosophical, literary or in the other
arts, is perhaps one of those topics of controversy more
suitable for conversation than for writing about. There
may perhaps be no one set of conditions most suitable
for the efflorescence of all these activities; it is equally
possible that the necessary conditions may vary from one
country and civilisation to another. The regime of Louis
XIV or of the Tudors and Stuarts could hardly be called
libertarian; on the other hand, the rule of authoritarian
governments in our time does not appear conducive to a
renascence of the arts. Whether the arts flourish best in a
period of growth and expansion, or in one of decay, is a

38

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
question that I cannot answer. A strong and even tyrannous
government may do no harm, so long as the sphere of its
control is strictly limited; so long as it limits itself to restrict-
ing the liberties, without attempting to influence the minds,
of its subjects; but a regime of unlimited demagogy appears
to be stultifying. I must restrict my consideration to the
position of the arts in our present society, and to what it
should be in such a future society as I envisage.

It may be that the conditions unfavourable to the arts to-
day lie too deep and are too extensive to depend upon the
differences between one form of government and another;
so that the prospect before us is either of slow continuous
decay or of sudden extinction. You cannot, in any scheme
for the reformation of society, aim directly at a condition
in which the arts will flourish: these activities are probably
by-products for which we cannot deliberately arrange the
conditions. On the other hand, their decay may always be
taken as a symptom of some social ailment to be investi-
gated. The future of art and thought in a democratic
society does not appear any brighter than any other, unless
democracy is to mean something very different from any-
thing actual. It is not that I would defend a moral censor-
ship: I have always expressed strong objections to the sup-
pression of books possessing, or even laying claim to
literary merit. But what is more insidious than any censor-
ship, is the steady influence which operates silently in any
mass society organised for profit, for the depression of stan-
dards of art and culture. The increasing organisation of ad-
vertisement and propaganda— or the influencing of masses
of men by any means except through their intelligence — is

39

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
all against them. The economic system is against them; the
chaos of ideals and confusion of thought in our large scale
mass education is against them; and against them also is the
disappearance of any class of people who recognise public
and private responsibility of patronage of the best that is
made and written. At a period in which each nation has
less and less ‘culture* for its own consumption, all are
making furious efforts to export their culture, to impress
upon each other their achievements in arts which they are
ceasing to cultivate or understand. And just as those who
should be the intellectuals regard theology as a special study,
like numismatics or heraldry, with which they need not
concern themselves, and theologians observe the same indif-
ference to literature and art, as special studies which do not
concern them, so our political classes regard both fields as
territories of which they have no reason to be ashamed of
remaining in complete ignorance. Accordingly the more
serious authors have a limited, and even provincial audience,
and the more popular write for an illiterate and uncritical
mob.

You cannot expect continuity and coherence in politics,
you cannot expect reliable behaviour on fixed principles
persisting through changed situations, unless there is an
underlying political philosophy: not of a party, but of the
nation. You cannot expect continuity and coherence in
literature and the arts, unless you have a certain uniformity
of culture, expressed in education by a settled, though not
rigid agreement as to what everyone should know to some
degree, and a positive distinction — however undemocratic
it may sound — between the educated and the uneducated.

40

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
I observed in America, that with a very high level of in-
telligence among undergraduates, progress was impeded
by the fact that one could never assume that any two, un-
less they had been at the same school under the influence of
the same masters at the same moment, had studied the same
subjects or read the same books, though the number of sub-
jects in which they had been instructed was surprising.
Even with a smaller amount of total information, it might
have been better if they had read fewer, but the same books.
In a negative liberal society you have no agreement as to
there being any body of knowledge which any educated
person should have acquired at any particular stage: the idea
of wisdom disappears, and you get sporadic and unrelated
experimentation. A nation’s system of education is much
more important than its system of government; only a
proper system of education can unify the active and the
contemplative life, action and speculation, politics and the
arts. But ‘education’, said Coleridge, ‘is to be reformed,
and defined as synonymous with instruction’. This revolu-
tion has been effected: to the populace education means in-
struction. The next step to be taken by the clericalism of
secularism, is the inculcation of the political principles
approved by the party in power.

I may seem to have wandered from my course, but it
seemed necessary to mention the capital responsibility of
education in the condition which we find or anticipate: a
state secularised, a community turned into a mob, and a
derisy disintegrated. The obvious secularist solution for
muddle is to subordinate everything to political power:
and in so far as this involves the subordination of the

4-1

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
money-making interests to those of the nation as a whole,
it offers some immediate, though perhaps illusory relief:
a people feels at least more dignified if its hero is the states-
man however unscrupulous, or the warrior however brutal,
rather than the financier. But it also means the confinement
of the clergy to a more and more restricted field of activity,
the subduing of free intellectual speculation, and the de-
bauching of the arts by political criteria. It is only in a
society with a religious basis — which is not the same thing
as an ecclesiastical despotism — that you can get the proper
harmony and tension, for the individual or for the com-
munity.

In any Christian society which can be imagined for the
future — in what M. Maritain calls a pluralist society — my
‘Community of Christians’ cannot be a body of the definite
vocational outline of the ‘clerisy 5 of Coleridge: which,
viewed in a hundred years’ perspective, appears to approxi-
mate to the rigidity of a caste. The Community of Chris-
tians is not an organisation, but a body of indefinite out-
line; composed of both clergy and laity, of the more con-
scious, more spiritually and intellectually developed of
both. It will be their identity of belief and aspiration, their
background of a common system of education and a com-
mon culture, which will enable them to influence and be
influenced by each other, and collectively to form the
conscious mind and the conscience of the nation.

The Spirit descends in different ways, and I cannot fore-
see any future society in which we could classify Christians
and non-Christians simply by their professions of belief,
or even, by any rigid code, by their behaviour. In the

42

THR IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
present ubiquity of ignorance, one cannot but suspect that
many who call themselves Christians do not understand
what the word means, and that some who would vigor-
ously repudiate Christianity are more Christian than many
who maintain it. And perhaps there will always be indi-
viduals who, with great creative gifts of value to mankind,
and the sensibility which such gifts imply, will yet remain
blind, indifferent, or even hostile. That must not disqualify
them from exercising the talents they have been given.

The foregoing sketch of a Christian society, from which
are omitted many details that will be considered essential,
could not stand even as a rough sketch — an ebauche — with-
out some treatment, according to the same economy, of
the relation of Church and State in such a society. So far,
nothing has suggested the existence of an organised Church
at all. But the State would remain under the necessity of
respecting Christian principles, only so far as the habits
and feelings of the people were not too suddenly affronted
or too violently outraged, or so far as it was deterred by
any univocal protest of the most influential of the Com-
munity of Christians. The State is Christian only nega-
tively; its Christianity is a reflection of the Christianity of
the society which it governs. We have no safeguard against
its proceeding, from un-Christian acts, to action on im-
plicitly un-Christian principles, and thence to action on
avowedly un-Christian principles. We have no safeguard
for the purity of our Christianity; for, as the State may
pass from expediency to lack of principle, and as the
Christian Community may sink into torpor, so the Com-
munity of Christians may be debilitated by group or

43

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
individual eccentricity and error. So far, we have only a
society such that it can have a significant relation to a
Church; a relationship which is not of hostility or even of
accommodation. And this relation is so important that
without discussing it we have not even shown the assembled
skeleton of a Christian Society, we have only exposed die
unarticulated bones.

44

Ill

I have spoken of this essay as being, in one aspect, a kind
of preface to the problem of Church and State; it is as
well, at this point, to indicate its prefatorial limitations. The
problem is one of concern to every Christian country —
that is, to every possible form of Christian society. It will
take a different form according to the traditions of that
society — Roman, Orthodox, or Lutheran. It will take
still another form in those countries, obviously the United
States of America and the Dominions, where the variety
of races and religious communions represented appears
to render the problem insoluble. Indeed, for these latter
countries the problem might not appear even to exist;
these countries might appear to be committed from their
origin to a neutral form of society. I am not ignoring
the possibility of a neutral society, under such conditions,
persisting indefinitely. But I believe that if these countries
are to develop a positive culture of their own, and not
remain merely derivatives of Europe, they can only pro-
ceed either in the direction of a pagan or of a Christian
society. I am not suggesting that the latter alternative must
lead to the forcible suppression, or to the complete dis-
appearance of dissident sects; still less, I hope, to a super-
ficial union of Churches under an official exterior, a union
in which theological differences would be so belittled

45

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
that its Christianity might become wholly bogus. But a
positive culture must have a positive set of values, and the
dissentients must remain marginal, tending to make only
marginal contributions.

However dissimilar the local conditions, therefore, this
question of Church and State is of importance everywhere.
Its actuality in Europe may make it appear all the more
remote in America, just as its actuality in England raises
a number of considerations remote to the rest of Europe.
But if what I say in the following pages has its direct
application only in England, it is not because I am thinking
of local matters without relation to Christendom as a whole.
It is partly that I can only discuss profitably the situations
with which I am most familiar, and partly that a more
generalised consideration would appear to deal only with
figments and fancies. I have therefore limited my field to
the possibility of a Christian society in England, and in
speaking of Church and State it is the Anglican Church
that I have in mind. But it must be remembered that such
terms as ‘Establishment’ and ‘Established Church’ can have
a wider meaning than we ordinarily give them. On the
other hand, I only mean such a Church as can claim to
represent the traditional form of Christian belief and wor-
ship of the great mass of the people of a particular country.

If my outline of a Christian society has commanded the
assent of the reader, he will agree that such a society can
only be realised when the great majority of the sheep belong
to one fold. To those who maintain that unity is a matter
1 of indifference, to those who maintain even that a diversity
of theological views is a good thing to an indefinite degree,

46

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
I can make no appeal. But if the desirability of unity be
admitted, if the idea of a Christian society be grasped and
accepted, then it can only be realised, in England, through
the Church of England. This is not the place for discussing
the theological position of that Church: if in any points it
is wrong, inconsistent, or evasive, these are matters for
reform within the Church. And I am not overlooking the
possibility and hope of eventual reunion or re-integration,
on one side and another; I am only affirming that it is this
Church which, by reason of its tradition, its organisation,
and its relation in the past to the religious-social life of the
people, is the one for our purpose — and that no Christian-
isation of England can take place without it.

The Church of a Christian society, then, should have
some relation to the three elements in a Christian society
that I have named. It must have a hierarchical organisation
in direct and official relation to the State: in which relation
it is always in danger of sinking into a mere department of
State. It must have an organisation, such as the parochial
system, in direct contact with the smallest units of the
community and their individual members. And finally, it *
must have, in the persons of its more intellectual, scholarly
and devout officers, its masters of ascetic theology and its
men of wider interests, a relation to the Community of
Christians. In matters of dogma, matters of faith and morals,
it will speak as the final authority within the nation; in
more mixed questions it will speak through individuals.
At times, it can and should be in conflict with the State, in
rebuking derelictions in policy, or in defending itself
against encroachments of the temporal power, or in

47

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
shielding the community against tyranny and asserting its
neglected rights, or in contesting heretical opinion or
immoral legislation and administration. At times, the
hierarchy of the Church may be under attack from the
Community of Christians, or from groups within it: for
any organisation is always in danger of corruption and in
need of reform from within.

Although I am not here concerned with the means by
which a Christian society could be brought about, it is
necessary always to consider the idea in relation to parti-
cular existing societies; because one does not expect or
desire that its constitution would be identical in all Chris-
tian countries. I do not assume that the relation of Church
and State in England, either as it is or as it might be,
is a model for all other communities. Whether an ‘Estab-
lishment’ is the best relation in the abstract, is nowhere my
question. Were there no Establishment in England, we
should have to examine its desirability. But as we have the
Establishment, we must take the situation as we find it,
and consider for a moment the merits of the problem of
Disestablishment. The advocates of this course, within the
Church, have many cogent reasons to expose: the abuses
and scandals which such a change might remedy, the
inconsistencies which might be removed, and the advan-
tages which might accrue, are too patent to require men-
tion. That abuses and defects of another kind might make
their appearance in a disestablished Church, is a possibility
which has not perhaps received enough attention. But
what is much more to my point is the gravity of the abdica-
tion which the Church — whether voluntarily or under

48

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY

pressure — would be making. Setting aside the anomalies
which might be corrected without going to that length, I
will admit that an Established Church is exposed to
peculiar temptations and compulsions: it has greater ad-
vantages and greater difficulties. But we must pause to re-
flect that a Church, once disestablished, cannot easily be
re-established, and that the very act of disestablishment
separates it more definitely and irrevocably from the life of
the nation than if it had never been established. The effect
on the mind of the people of the visible and dramatic with-
drawal of the Church from the affairs of the nation, of the
deliberate recognition of two standards and ways of life, of
the Church’s abandonment of all those who are not by
their wholehearted profession within the fold — this is in-
calculable; the risks are so great that such an act can be
nothing but a desperate measure. It appears to assume
something which I am not yet ready to take for granted:
that the division between Christians and non-Christians in
this country is already, or is determined to become, so
clear that it can be reduced to statistics. But if one believes,
as I do, that the great majority of people are neither one
thing nor the other, but are living in a no man’s land,
then the situation looks very different; and disestablish-
ment instead of being the recognition of a condition at
which we have arrived, would be the creation of a condition
the results of which we cannot foresee.

With the reform of the Establishment I am not here con-
cerned: the discussion of that requires a familiarity with
constitutional, canon, and civil law. But I do not think that
the argument from the prosperity of the disestablished

49

D

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
Church of Wales, sometimes brought forward by advo-
cates of disestablishment, is to the point. Apart from the
differences of racial temperament which must be taken into
account, the full effect of disestablishment cannot be seen
from the illustration of a small part of the island; and, if
disestablishment were made general, the full effect would
not appear at once. And I think that the tendency of the
time is opposed to the view that the religious and the secu-
lar life of the individual and the community can form two
separate and autonomous domains. I know that a theology
of the absolute separation of the life of the Spirit and the life
of the World has spread from Germany. Such a doctrine
appears more plausible, when the Church’s position is
wholly defensive, when it is subject to daily persecution,
when its spiritual claims are questioned and when its imme-
diate necessity is to keep itself alive and to keep its doctrine
pure. But this theology is incompatible with the assump-
tions underlying everything that I have been saying. The
increasing complexity of modern life renders it unaccept-
able, for, as I have already said, we are faced with vital
problems arising not merely out of the necessity of co-
operating with non-Christians, but out of our unescapeable
implication in non-Christian institutions and systems. And
finally, the totalitarian tendency is against it, for the ten-
dency of totalitarianism is to re-affirm, on a lower level,
the religious-social nature of society. And I am convinced
that you cannot have a national Christian society, a reli-
gious-social community, a society with a political philo-
sophy founded upon the Christian faith, if it is constituted
as a mere congeries of private and independent sects. The

50

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
national faith must have an official recognition by the
State, as well as an accepted status in the community and a
basis of conviction in the heart of the individual.

Heresy is often defined as an insistence upon one half of
the truth; it can also be an attempt to simplify the truth, by
reducing it to the limits of our ordinary understanding, in-
stead of enlarging our reason to the apprehension of truth.
Monotheism or tritheism is easier to grasp than trinitarian-
ism. We have observed the lamentable results of the
attempt to isolate the Church from the World; there are
also instances of the failure of the attempt to integrate the
World in the Church; we must also be on guard against
the attempt to integrate the Church in the World. A per-
manent danger of an established Church is Erastianism: we
do not need to refer to the eighteenth century, or to pre-
war Russia, to remind ourselves of that. Deplorable as
such a situation is, it is not so much the immediate and
manifest scandals but the ultimate consequences of Eras-
tianism that are the most serious offences. By alienating
the mass of the people from orthodox Christianity, by
leading them to identify the Church with the actual hier-
archy and to suspect it of being an instrument of oligarchy
or class, it leaves men’s minds exposed to varieties of irre-
sponsible and irreflective enthusiasm followed by a second
crop of paganism.

The danger of a National Church becoming a class
Church, is not one that concerns us immediately to-day;
for now that it is possible to be respectable without being a
member of the Church of England, or a Christian of any
kind, it is also possible to be a member of the Church of

5i

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
England without being — in that sense — respectable. The
danger that a National Church might become also a
nationalistic Church is one to which our predecessors
theorising about Church and State could hardly have been
expected to devote attention, since the danger of national-
ism itself, and the danger of the supersession of every form
of Christianity, could not have been very present to their
minds. Yet the danger was always there: and, for some
persons still, Rome is associated with the Armada and
Kingsley’s Westward Ho ! For a National Church tends to
reflect only the religious-social habits of the nation; and its
members, in so far as they are isolated from the Christian
communities of other nations, may tend to lose all criteria
by which to distinguish, in their own religious-social
complex, between what is universal and what is local,
accidental, and erratic. Within limits, the cultus of the
universal Church may quite properly vary according to
the racial temperaments and cultural traditions of each
nation. Roman Catholicism is not quite the same thing (to
the eye of the sociologist, if not to that of the theologian)
in Spain, France, Ireland and the United States of America,
and but for central authority it would differ much more
widely. The tendency to differ may be as strong among
bodies of the same communion in different countries, as
among various sects within the same country; and, indeed,
the sects within one country may be expected to show
traits in common, which none of them will share with the
same communion abroad.

The evils of nationalistic Christianity have, in the past,
been mitigated by the relative weakness of national con-

52

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY

sciousness and the strength of Christian tradition. They
have not been wholly absent: missionaries have sometimes
been accused of propagating (through ignorance, not
through cunning) the customs and attitudes of the social
groups to which they have belonged, rather than giving
the natives the essentials of the Christian faith in such a way
that they might harmonise their own culture with it. On the
other hand, I think that some events during the last twenty-
five years have led to an increasing recognition of the supra-
national Christian society: for if that is not marked by
such conferences as those of Lausanne, Stockholm, Oxford,
Edinburgh — and also Malines — then I do not know of
what use these conferences have been. The purpose of the
labours involved in arranging intercommunion between
the official Churches of certain countries is not merely to
provide reciprocal sacramental advantages for travellers,
but to affirm the Universal Church on earth. Certainly, no
one to-day can defend the idea of a National Church, with-
out balancing it with the idea of the Universal Church, and
without keeping in mind that truth is one and that theology
has no frontiers.

I think that the dangers to which a National Church is
exposed, when the Universal Church is no more than a
pious ideal, are so obvious that only to mention them is to
command assent. Completely identified with a particular
people, the National Church may at all times, but especially
at moments of excitement, become no more than the voice
of that people’s prejudice, passion or interest. But there is
another danger, not quite so easily identified. I have main-
tained that the idea of a Christian society implies, for me,

53

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
the existence of one Church which shall aim at compre-
hending the whole nation. Unless it has this aim, we re-
lapse into that conflict between citizenship and church-
membership, between public and private morality, which
to-day makes moral life so difficult for everyone, and which
in turn provokes that craving for a simplified, monistic
solution of statism or racism which the National Church
can only combat if it recognises its position as a part of the
Universal Church. But if we allowed ourselves to entertain
for Europe (to confine our attention to that continent) the
ideal merely of a kind of society of Christian societies, we
might tend unconsciously to treat the idea of the Universal
Church as only the idea of a supernatural League of Nations.
The direct allegiance of the individual would be to his
National Church alone, and the Universal Church would
remain an abstraction or become a cockpit for conflicting
national interests. But the difference between the Universal
Church and a perfected League of Nations is this, that the
allegiance of the individual to his own Church is secondary
to his allegiance to the Universal Church. Unless the
National Church is a part of the whole, it has no claim upon
me: but a League of Nations which could have a claim up-
on the devotion of the individual, prior to the claim of his
country, is a chimaera which very few persons can even
have endeavoured to picture to themselves. I have spoken
more than once of the intolerable position of those who try
to lead a Christian life in a non-Christian world. But it
must be kept in mind that even in a Christian society as well
organised as we can conceive possible in this world, the
limit would be that our temporal and spiritual life should

54

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
be harmonised: the temporal and spiritual would never be
identified. There would always remain a dual allegiance, to
the State and to the Church, to one’s countrymen and to
one’s fellow-Christians everywhere, and the latter would
always have the primacy. There would always be a tension;
and this tension is essential to the idea of a Christian society,
and is a distinguishing mark between a Christian and a
pagan society.

55

IV

I t should be obvious that the form of political organisa-
tion of a Christian State does not come within the scope
of this discussion. To identify any particular form of
government with Christianity is a dangerous error: for it
confounds the permanent with the transitory, the absolute
with the contingent. Forms of government, and of social
organisation, are in constant process of change, and their
operation may be very different from the theory which
they are supposed to exemplify. A theory of the State may
be, explicidy or implicitly, anti-Christian: it may arrogate
rights which only the Church is entitled to claim, or pre-
tend to decide moral questions on which only the Church
is qualified to pronounce. On the other hand, a regime may
in practice claim either more or less than it professes, and
we have to examine its working as well as its constitution.
We have no assurance that a democratic regime might not
be as inimical to Christianity in practice, as another might
be in theory: and the best government must be relative to
the character and the stage of intelligence and education of
a particular people in a particular place at a particular time.
Those who consider that a discussion of the nature of a
Christian society should conclude by supporting a parti-
cular form of political organisation, should ask themselves
whether they really believe our form of govefnment to be

57

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
more important than our Christianity; and those who are
convinced that the present form of government of Britain
is the one most suitable for any Christian people, should ask
themselves whether they are confusing a Christian society
with a society in which individual Christianity is tolerated.

This essay is not intended to be either an anti-communist
or an anti-fascist manifesto; the reader may by this
time have forgotten what I said at the beginning, to the
effect that I was less concerned with the more superficial,
though important differences between the regiment of
different nations, than with the more profound differences
between pagan and Christian society. Our preoccupation
with foreign politics during the last few years has induced a
surface complacency rather than a consistent attempt at
t self-examination of conscience. Sometimes we are almost
persuaded that we are getting on very nicely, with a reform
here and a reform there, and would have been getting on
still better, if only foreign governments did not insist upon
breaking all the rules and playing what is really a different
game. What is more depressing still is the thought that only
fear or jealousy of foreign success can alarm us about the
health of our own nation; that only through this anxiety
can we see such things as depopulation, mal-nutrition,
moral deterioration, the decay of agriculture, as evils at all.
And what is worst of all is to advocate Christianity, not be-
cause it is true, but because it might be beneficial. Towards
the end of 1938 we experienced a wave of revivalism which
should teach us that folly is not the prerogative of any one
political party or any one religious communion, and that
hysteria is not the privilege of the uneducated. The Chris-

58

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
tianity expressed has been vague, the religious fervour has
been a fervour for democracy. It may engender nothing
better than a disguised and peculiarly sanctimonious
nationalism, accelerating our progress towards the pagan-
ism which we say we abhor. To justify Christianity because
it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing
the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Chris-
tianity, is a very dangerous inversion; and we may reflect,
that a good deal of the attention of totalitarian states has
been devoted, with a steadiness of purpose not always
found in democracies, to providing their national life with
a foundation of morality — the wrong kind perhaps, but a
good deal more of it. It is not enthusiasm, but dogma, that
differentiates a Christian from a pagan society.

I have tried to restrict my ambition of a Christian society
to a social minimum: to picture, not a society of saints, but
of ordinary men, of men whose Christianity is communal
before being individual. It is very easy for speculation on a
possible Christian order in the future to tend to come to
rest in a kind of apocalyptic vision of a golden age of virtue.
But we have to remember that the Kingdom of Christ on
earth will never be realised, and also that it is always being
realised; we must remember that whatever reform or
revolution we carry out, the result will always be a sordid
travesty of what human society should be — though the
world is never left wholly w ithout glory. In such a society
as I imagine, as in any that is not petrified, there will be in-
numerable seeds of decay. Any human scheme for society
is realised only when the great mass of humanity has be-
come adapted to it; but this adaptation becomes also, in-

59

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
sensibly, an adaptation of the scheme itself to the mass on
which it operates: the overwhelming pressure of medio-
crity, sluggish and indomitable as a glacier, will mitigate
the most violent, and depress the most exalted revolution,
and what is realised is so unlike the end that enthusiasm con-
ceived, that foresight would weaken the effort. A wholly
Christian society might be a society for the most part on a
low level; it would engage the cooperation of many whose
Christianity was spectral or superstitious or feigned, and of
many whose motives were primarily worldly and selfish.
It would require constant reform.

I should not like it to be thought, however, that I con-
sidered the presence of the higher forms of devotional life
to be a matter of minor importance for such a society. I
have, it is true, insisted upon the communal, rather than die
individual aspect: a community of men and women, not
individually better than they are now, except for the capital
difference of holding the Christian faith. But their holding
the Christian faith would give them something else which
they lack: a respect for the religious life, for the life of prayer
and contemplation, and for those who attempt to practise
it. In this I am asking no more of the British Christian, than
is characteristic of the ordinary Moslem or Hindu. But the
ordinary man would need the opportunity to know that
the religious life existed, that it was given its due place,
would need to recognise the profession of those who have
abandoned the world, as he recognises the professions
practised in it. I cannot conceive a Christian society with-
out religious orders, even purely contemplative orders,
even enclosed orders. And, incidentally, I should not like

60

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
the ‘Community of Christians’ of which I have spoken, to
be thought of as merely the nicest, most intelligent and
public-spirited of the upper middle class — it is not to be
conceived on that analogy.

We may say that religion, as distinguished from modem
paganism, implies a life in conformity with nature. It may
be observed that the natural life and the supernatural life
have a conformity to each other which neither has with the
mechanistic life: but so far has our notion of what is natural
become distorted, that people who consider it ‘unnatural’
and therefore repugnant, that a person of either sex should
elect a life of celibacy, consider it perfectly ‘natural’ that
famili es should be limited to one or two children. It would
perhaps be more natural, as well as in better conformity
with the Will of God, if there were more celibates and if
those who were married had larger families. But I am
thinking of ‘conformity to nature’ in a wider sense than
this. We are being made aware that the organisation of
society on the principle of private profit, as well as public
destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity
by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of
natural resources, and that a good deal of our material pro-
gress is a progress for which succeeding generations may
have to pay dearly. I need only mention, as an instance now
very much before the public eye, the results of ‘soil-
erosion’ — the exploitation of the earth, on a vast scale for
two generations, for commercial profit: immediate benefits
leading to dearth and desert. I would not have it thought
that I condemn a society because of its material ruin, for
that would be to make its material success a sufficient test of

61

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
its excellence; I mean only that a wrong attitude towards
nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God,
and that the consequence is an inevitable doom. For a long
enough time we have believed in nothing but the values
arising in a mechanised, commercialised, urbanised way of
life: it would be as well for us to face the permanent con-
ditions upon which God allows us to live upon this planet.
And without sentimentalising the life of the savage, we
might practise the humility to observe, in some of the
societies upon which we look down as primitive or back-
ward, the operation of a social-religious-artistic complex
which we should emulate upon a higher plane. We have
been accustomed to regard ‘progress’ as always integral;
and have yet to learn that it is only by an effort and a disci-
pline, greater than society has yet seen the need of imposing
upon itself, that material knowledge and power is gained
without loss of spiritual knowledge and power. The
struggle to recover the sense of relation to nature and to
God, the recognition that even the most primitive feelings
should be part of our heritage, seems to me to be the ex-
planation and justification of the life of D. H. Lawrence,
and the excuse for his aberrations. But we need not only to
learn how to look at the world with the eyes of a Mexican
Indian — and I hardly think that Lawrence succeeded — and
we certainly cannot afford to stop there. We need to know
how to see the world as the Christian Fathers saw it; and the
purpose of reascending to origins is that we should be able
to return, with greater spiritual knowledge, to our own
situation. We need to recover the sense of religious fear, so
that it may be overcome by religious hope.

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY

I should not like to leave the reader supposing that I have
attempted to contribute one more amateur sketch of an
abstract and impracticable future: the blue-print from
which the doctrinaire criticises the piecemeal day to day
efforts of political men. These latter efforts have to go on;
but unless we can find a pattern in which all problems of
life can have their place, we are only likely to go on com-
plicating chaos. So long, for instance, as we consider
finance, industry, trade, agriculture merely as competing
interests to be reconciled from time to time as best they
may, so long as we consider ‘education’ as a good in itself
of which everyone has a right to the utmost, without any
ideal of the good life for society or for the individual, we
shall move from one uneasy compromise to another. To
the quick and simple organisation of society for ends which,
being only material and worldly, must be as ephemeral as
worldly success, there is only one alternative. As political
philosophy derives its sanction from ethics, and ethics from
the truth of religion, it is only by returning to the eternal
source of truth that we can hope for any social organisation
which will not, to its ultimate destruction, ignore some
essential aspect of reality. The term ‘democracy’, as I have
said again and again, does not contain enough positive con-
tent to stand alone against the forces that you dislike — it
can easily be transformed by them. If you will not have
God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects
to Hitler or Stalin.

I believe that there must be many persons who, like my-
self, were deeply shaken by the events of September 1938,
in a way from which one does not recover; persons to

63

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
•whom that month brought a profounder realisation of a
general plight. It was not a disturbance of the understand-
ing: the events themselves were not surprising. Nor, as be-
came increasingly evident, was our distress due merely to
disagreement with the policy and behaviour of the moment.
The feeling which was new and unexpected was a feeling
of humiliation, which seemed to demand an act of personal
contrition, of humility, repentance and amendment; what
had happened was something in which one was deeply
implicated and responsible. It was not, I repeat, a criticism
of the government, but a doubt of the validity of a civilisa-
tion. We could not match conviction with conviction,
we had no ideas with which we could either meet or
oppose the ideas opposed to us. Was our society, which had
always been so assured of its superiority and rectitude, so
confident of its unexamined premisses, assembled round
anything more permanent than a congeries of banks, in-
surance companies and industries, and had it any beliefs
more essential than a belief in compound interest and the
maintenance of dividends? Such thoughts as these formed
the starting point, and must remain the excuse, for saying
what I have had to say.

September 6 th, 1939. The whole of this book, with Pre-
face and Notes, was completed before it was known that
we should be at war. But the possibility of war, which has
now been realised, was always present to my mind, and the
only additional observations which I feel called upon to
make are these: first, that the alignment of forces which
has now revealed itself should bring more clearly to our

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THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
consciousness the alternative of Christianity or paganism;
and, second, that we cannot afford to defer our construc-
tive thinking to the conclusion of hostilities — a moment
when, as we should know from experience, good counsel
is liable to be obscured.

E

<55

NOTES

Page 8. In using the term ‘Idea* I have of course had in
mind the definition given by Coleridge, when he lays down
at the beginning of his Church and State that: ‘By an idea I
mean (in this instance) that conception of a thing, which is
not abstracted from any particular state, form or mode, in
which the thing may happen to exist at this or that time;
nor yet generalised from any number or succession of such
forms or modes; but which is given by the knowledge of
its ultimate aim’.

P. io. Christian sociologists. I am deeply indebted to
several Christian economists and sociologists, both in Eng-
land and elsewhere, and notably to R. H. Tawney. My
difference of approach in these pages need not be further
elaborated, but it is interesting to compare the treatment
of the problem of Church and State by V. A. Demant in
his very valuable Christian Polity, p. 120 ff. and p. 135 ff.
Fr. Demant observes that the authority of the Church ‘can-
not now be claimed on the ground that it represents all
citizens’. But while the Church does not represent all
citizens in the sense in which a Member of Parliament may
be said to ‘represent’ his constituents, even those who vote
consistently against him, yet its function seems to me wider
than only to ‘safeguard the individual in his right to pursue
67

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
certain purposes which are not political purposes’; what I
am primarily concerned, with throughout is not the re-
sponsibility of the Church towards the individual but to-
wards the community. The relation of the Church with
the State may be one of checks and balances, but the back-
ground and justification of this relation is the Church’s re-
lation to Society. Fr. Demant gives a very good account of
the forces tending towards acceptance of the absolutist
State, and remarks truly that: ‘This fact of the secularisation
of human life does not arise mainly from the extension of
the State’s powers. This is rather the effort of the State to
recover significance in the life of a people which has be-
come disintegrated through the confusion of social means
and ends which is its secularisation.’

One of the causes of the totalitarian State is an effort of
the State to supply a function which the Church has ceased
to serve; to enter into a relation to the community which
the Church has failed to maintain; which leads to the
recognition as full citizens only of those who are prepared
to accept it in this relation.

I agree cordially with Fr. Demant’s observation that:
‘The fact which renders most of our theories of Church
and State irrelevant is the domination of politics by econo-
mics and finance; and this is most true in democratic states.
The subservience of politics to plutocracy is the main fact
about the State confronting the Church to-day.’

Fr. Demant is concerned with the reform of this situa-
tion, in a secular society; and with the right position of the
Church in a secular society. But unless I have misunder-
stood him, he appears to me to take this secularisation for

68

NOTES

granted. Assuming that our present society is neutral rather
than non-Christian, I am concerned with enquiring what it
might be like if it took the Christian direction.

P . 19. ‘Totalitarianism can retain the terms ‘freedom’ and
‘democracy’ and give them its own meaning’. A letter
appeared in The Times (April 24, 1939) from General
J. F. C. Fuller, who, as The Times had previously stated,
was one of the two British visitors invited to Herr Hider’s
birthday celebrations. General Fuller states that he is ‘a
firm believer in the democracy of Mazzini, because he
places duty to the nation before individual rights’. General
Fuller calls himself a ‘British Fascist’, and believes that
Britain ‘must swim with the out-flowing tide of this great
political change’ (i.e. to a fascist system of government) .

From my point of view, General Fuller has as good a
title to call himself a ‘believer in democracy’ as anyone else.

P. 19. Imitation a rehours . A column in the Evening
Standard of May 10, 1939, headed ‘Back to the Kitchen
Creed Denounced , reported the annual conference of the
Civil Service Clerical Association.

‘Miss Bower of the Ministry of Transport, who moved
that the association should take steps to obtain the removal
of the ban (i.e. against married women Civil Servants) said
it was wise to abolish an institution which embodied one of
the main tenets of the Nazi creed — the relegation of women
to the sphere of the kitchen, the children and the church’.

The report, by its abbreviation, may do less than justice
to Miss Bower, but I do not think that I am unfair to the
report, in finding the implication that what is Nazi is wrong,

69

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
and need not be discussed on its own merits. Incidentally,
the term ‘relegation of women* prejudices the issue. Might
one suggest that the kitchen, the children and the church
could be considered to have a claim upon the attention of
married women? or that no normal married woman would
prefer to be a wage-earner if she could help it? What is
miserable is a system that makes the dual wage necessary.

P. 20. Fascist doctrine. I mean only such doctrine as
asserts the absolute authority of the state, or the infallibility
of a ruler. ‘The corporative state’, recommended by Quad-
ragesimo Anno, is not in question. The economic organisa-
tion of totalitarian states is not in question. The ordinary
person does not object to fascism because it is pagan, but
because he is fearful of authority, even when it is pagan.

P. 20. The red herring of the German national religion.
I cannot hold such a low opinion of German intelligence as
to accept any stories of the revival of pre-Christian cults. I
can, however, believe that the kind of religion expounded
by Professor Wilhelm Hauer is really in existence — and I
am very sorry to believe it. I rely upon the essay contri-
buted by Dr. Hauer to a very interesting volume, Germany’s
New Religion (Allen and Unwin, 1937), in which orthodox
Lutheranism is defended by Karl Heim, and Catholicism
by Karl Adam.

The religion of Hauer is deistic, claiming to ‘worship a
more than human God’. He believes it to be ‘an eruption
from the biological and spiritual depths of the German
nation’, and unless one is prepared to deny that the German

70

NOTES

nation has such depths, I do not see that the statement
can be ridiculed. He believes that ‘each new age must
mold its own religious forms’ — alas, many persons in
Anglo-Saxon countries hold the same belief. He professes
himself to be particularly a disciple ofEckhart; and whether
or not one believes that the doctrines condemned by the
Church were what Eckhart strove to propagate, it is cer-
tainly the condemned doctrine that Hauer holds. He con-
siders that the ‘revolt of the German from Christianity
reached its culmination in Nietzsche’: many people would
not limit that revolt to the German. He advocates tolerance.
He objects to Christianity because ‘it claims to possess the
absolute truth, and with this claim is bound up the idea that
men can only achieve salvation in one way, through Christ,
and that it must send to the stake those whose faith and life
do not conform, or pray for them till they quit the error of
their ways for the kingdom of God’. Thousands of people
in Western countries would agree with this attitude. He
objects to sacramental religion, because ‘everyone has an
immediate relation to God, is, in fact, in the depths of his
heart one with the eternal Ground of the world’. Faith
comes not from revelation but from ‘personal experience’.
He is not interested in ‘the mass of intellectuals’, but in the
‘multitudes of ordinary people’ who are looking for ‘Life’.
‘We believe’, he says, ‘that God has laid a great task on our
nation, and that he has therefore revealed himself specially
in its history and will continue to do so’. To my ear, such
phrases have a not altogether unfamiliar ring. Hauer be-
lieves also in something very popular in this country, the
religion of the blue sky, the grass and flowers. He believes

7i

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
that Jesus (even if he was wholly Semitic on both sides) is
one of the ‘great figures who soar above the centuries’.

I have quoted so much, in order to let Professor Hauer
declare himself for what he is: the end product of German
Liberal Protestantism, a nationalistic Unitarian. Translated
into English terms, he might be made to appear as simply a
patriotic Modernist. The German National Religion, as
Hauer expounds it, turns out to be something with which
we are already familiar. So, if the German Religion is also
your religion, the sooner you realise the fact the better.

P. 23. ‘Hygienic morality’. M. Denis de Rougemont, in
his remarkable book L’ Amour et V Occident, has this sentence
(p. 269) which is to the point: ‘L’anarchie des moeurs et
l’hygiene autoritaire agissent a peu pres dans le meme
sens: elles de9oivent le besoin de passion, hereditaire ou
acquis par la culture; elles detendent ses ressorts intimes et
personnels.’

P. 24. It may be opportune at this point to say a word
about the attitude of a Christian Society towards Pacifism.
I am not concerned with rationalistic pacifism, or with
humanitarian pacifism, but with Christian pacifism — that
which asserts that all warfare is categorically forbidden to
followers of Our Lord. This absolute Christian pacifism
should be distinguished again from another: that which
would assert that only a Christian society is worth fighting
for, and that a particular society may fall so far short, or
may be so positively anti-Christian, that no Christian will
be justified or excused for fighting for it. With this relative
Christian pacifism I cannot be concerned, because my

7 2

NOTES

hypothesis is that of a Christian society. In such a society,
what will be the place of the Christian pacifist?

Such a person would continue to exist, as sects and in-
dividual vagaries would probably continue to exist; and it
would be the duty of the Christian who was not a pacifist
to treat the pacifist with consideration and respect. It would
also be the duty of the State to treat him with consideration
and respect, having assured itself of his sincerity. The man
who believes that a particular war in which his country
proposes to engage is an aggressive war, who believes that
his country could refuse to take part in it without its legiti-
mate interests being imperilled, and without failing in its
duty to God and its neighbours, would be wrong to remain
silent (the attitude of the late Charles Eliot Norton in re-
gard to the Spanish- American War of 1898 is to the point).
But I cannot but believe that the man who maintains that
war is in all circumstances wrong, is in some way repudi-
ating an obligation towards society; and in so far as the
society is a Christian society the obligation is so much the
more serious. Even if each particular war proves in turn to
have been unjustified, yet the idea of a Christian society
seems incompatible with the idea of absolute pacifism; for
pacifism can only continue to flourish so long as the majori-
ty of persons forming a society are not pacifists; just as
sectarianism can only flourish against the background of
orthodoxy. The notion of communal responsibility, of
the responsibility of every individual for the sins of the
society to which he belongs, is one that needs to be more
firmly apprehended; and if I share the guilt of my society
in time of peace’, I do not see how I can absolve myself

73

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
from it in time of war, by abstaining from the common
action.

P. 2 6. The Community of Christians. This term is per-
haps open to objection. I did not wish to employ Cole-
ridge’s term ‘clerisy’ while altering its meaning, but I
assume that the reader is familiar with ‘clerisy’ in his
Church and State , and with Mr. Middleton Murry’s use of
the same word. Perhaps the term ‘Community of Chris-
tians’ may connote to some a kind of esoteric chapelle or
fraternity of the self-appointed, but I hope that what is said
later in this chapter may prevent that inference. I wished to
avoid excessive emphasis on nominal function, as it seemed
to me that Coleridge’s ‘clerisy’ might tend to become
merely a brahminical caste.

I should add, as a note on the use of the phrase ‘superior
intellectual and/or spiritual gifts’ (p. 20), that the possession
of intellectual or spiritual gifts does not necessarily confer
that intellectual understanding of spiritual issues which is
the qualification for exerting the kind of influence here
required. Nor is the person who possesses this qualification
necessarily a ‘better Christian’ in his private life than the
man whose insight is less profound; nor is he necessarily
exempt from doctrinal error. I prefer that the definition
should be, provisionally, too comprehensive rather than
too narrow.

P. 36. Christian Education. This note, as well as that on
‘The Community of Christians’, is elicited by a searching
comment by Bro. George Every, S.S.M., who has been so
kind as to read this book in proof. Those who have read a

74

NOTES

paper called ‘Modem Education and the Classics’, written
in a different context, and published in a volume entitled
Essays Ancient and Modem, may assume that what I have in
mind is simply the ‘classical education’ of earlier times. The
problem of Education is too large to be considered in a
brief book like this, and the question of the best curriculum
is not here raised. I limit myself to the assertion that the
miscellaneous curriculum will not do, and that education
must be something more than the acquisition of informa-
tion, technical competence, or superficial culture. Further-
more, I am not here concerned with what must occupy the
mind of anyone approaching the subject of Education
directly, that is the question of what should be done now.
The point upon which all who are dissatisfied with con-
temporary Education can agree, is the necessity for criteria
and values. But one must start by expelling from one’s
mind any mere prejudice or sentiment in favour of any
previous system of education, and recognising the differ-
ences between the society for which we have to legislate,
and any form of society which we have known in the past.

P. 40. Uniformity of culture. In an important passage in
Beyond Politics (pp. 23-31) Mr. Christopher Dawson dis-
cusses the possibility of an ‘organisation of culture’. He
recognises that it is impossible to do this ‘by any kind of
philosophic or scientific dictatorship’, or by a return ‘to the
old humanist discipline of letters, for that is inseparable
from the aristocratic ideal of a privileged caste of scholars’.
He asserts that ‘a democratic society must find a corres-
pondingly democratic organisation of culture’; and finds

75

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY

that ‘the form of organisation appropriate to our society in
the field of culture as well as in that of politics is the party —
that is to say, a voluntary organisation for common ends
based on a common “ideology” \

I think that I am in close sympathy with Mr. Dawson’s
aims, and yet I find it difficult to apprehend the meaning of
this ‘culture’ which will have no philosophy (for philo-
sophy, he reminds us, has lost its ancient prestige) and
which will not be specifically religious. What, in the kind
of society to which we are approximating, will be a ‘demo-
cratic organisation of culture’? To substitute for ‘demo-
cratic’ a term which for me has greater concreteness, I
should say that the society which is coming into existence,
and which is advancing in every country whether ‘demo-
cratic’ or ‘totalitarian’, is a lower middle class society: I
should expect the culture of the twentieth century to
belong to the lower middle class as that of the Victorian
age belonged to the upper middle class or commercial
aristocracy. If then for Mr. Dawson’s phrase we substitute
the words ‘a lower middle class society must find a corres-
pondingly lower middle class organisation of culture’ we
have something which seems to me to possess more mean-
ing, though it leaves us in greater perplexity. And if Mr.
Dawson’s Culture Party — about which, however, our
information is still meagre — is to be representative of this fu-
ture society, is it likely to provide anything more important
than, for example, a lower middle class Royal Academy
instead of one supplying portrait painters for aldermen?

It may be that I have wholly failed to understand what
Mr. Dawson is after: if so, I can only hope that he will let

76

NOTES

us have a fuller exposition of his ideas. Unless some useful
analogy can be given from the past, I cannot understand
the ‘organisation of culture’, which appears to be without
precedent, and in isolating culture from religion, politics
and philosophy we seem to be left with something no more
apprehensible than the scent of last year’s roses. When we
speak of culture, I suppose that we have in mind the exist-
ence of two classes of people the producers and the con-
sumers of culture — the existence of men who can create
new thought and new art (with middlemen who can teach
the consumers to like it) and the existence of a cultivated
society to enjoy and patronise it. The former you can only
encourage, the latter you can only educate.

I would not belittle the importance, in a penod of trans-
ition, of the rearguard action; of such mstitutions, m their
various special ways, as the National Trust, the Society for
the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, even the National
Society. We ought not to cut down old trees until we have
learned to plant new ones. But Mr. Dawson is concerned
with somethmg more important than the preservation of
rehcs of former culture. My provisional view can only be
that ‘culture’ is a by-product, and that those who sym-
pathise with Mr. Dawson m resenting the tyranny of
politics, must direct their attention to the problem of
Education, and of how, in the lower middle class society of
the future, to provide for the training of an elite of thought,
conduct and taste.

When I speak of a probable ‘lower middle class society’
I do not anticipate — short of some at present unpredictable
revolution — the rise in Britain of a lower middle class

77

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
political hierarchy, though our ruling class will have to
cultivate, in its dealings with foreign countries, an under-
standing of that mentality. Britain will presumably con-
tinue to be governed by the same mercantile and financial
class which, with a continual change of personnel, has been
increasingly important since the fifteenth century. I mean
by a lower middle class society’ one in which the standard
man legislated for and catered for, the man whose passions
must be manipulated, whose prejudices must be humoured,
whose tastes must be gratified, will be the lower middle
class man. He is the most numerous, the one most necessary
to flatter. I am not necessarily implying that this is either a
good or a bad thing: that depends upon what lower middle
class Man does to himself, and what is done to him.

P. 48. Advocates of Disestablishment. It is interesting to
compare Bishop Hensley Henson’s vigorous defence of the
Establishment, Cui Bono?, published more than forty years
ago, with his more recent Disestablishment, in which he took
a contrary view, but too great importance could be
attached, by one side or the other, to this recantation. The
argument for Establishment in the early essay, and the
argument against it in the later, are both well presented,
and both deserve study. What has happened seems to me
to be simply that Bishop Hensley Henson has come to take
a different view of the tendencies of modern society; and
the changes since the end of the last century are great
enough to excuse such a change of opinion. His early
argument is not invalidated; he might say that the situation
is now such that it cannot be applied.

78

NOTES

I must take this occasion for calling attention to the great
excellence of Bishop Hensley Henson’s prose, whether
it is employed in a volume prepared at leisure, or in an
occasional letter to The Times . For vigour and purity of
controversial English, he has no superior to-day, and his
writings should long continue to be studied by those who
aspire to write well.

P. 51. The dangers of a nationalistic Church. Doubts
about the doctrinal security of a national Church must
come to the mind of any reader of Mr. Middleton Murry’s
The Price of Leadership . The first part of this book I read
with the warmest admiration, and I can support all that
Mr. Murry says in favour of a National Church against
sectarianism and private Christianity. But at the point at
which Mr. Murry allies himself with Dr. Thomas Arnold
I begin to hesitate. I have no first hand acquaintance
with the doctrines of Dr. Arnold, and must rely upon
Mr. Murry’s exposition of them. But Mr. Murry does
not engage my complete confidence in Arnold; nor do
the citations of Arnold reassure me about the orthodoxy
of Mr. Murry. Mr. Murry holds that ‘the real conflict that
is preparing is the conflict between Christianity and anti-
Christian nationalism’: but surely a nationalism which is
overtly antagonistic to Christianity is a less dangerous
menace for us than a nationalism which professes a Chris-
tianity from which all Christian content has been evacua-
ted. That the Church in England should be identical with
the nation — a view which Mr. Murry believes he has
found in Arnold and before him in Coleridge, and which

79

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
Mr. Murry himself accepts — is a laudable aim so long as
we keep in mind that we are speaking of one aspect of the
Church; but unless this is balanced by the idea of the rela-
tion of the Church in England to the Universal Church, I
see no safeguard for the purity or the catholicity of its doc-
trine. I am not even sure that Mr. Murry desires such a
safeguard. He quotes, with apparent approval, this sentence
by Matthew Arnold: ‘Will there never arise among Catho-
lics some great soul, to perceive that the eternity and uni-
versality, which is vainly claimed for Catholic dogma and
the ultramontane system, might really be possible for
Catholic worship?’

Well! if eternity and universality is to be found, not in
dogma, but in worship — that means, in a common form
of worship which will mean to the worshippers anything
that they like to fancy, then the result seems to me to be
likely to be the most corrupt form of ritualism. What does
Mr. Murry mean by Christianity in his National Church,
except whatever the nation as such may decide to call
Christianity, and what is to prevent the Christianity from
being degraded to the nationalism, rather than the national-
ism being raised to Christianity?

Mr. Murry holds that Dr. Arnold introduced a new
Christian spirit into the public schools. I would not deny
to Dr. Arnold the honour of having reformed and improved
the moral standards inculcated by public schools, or dispute
the assertion that to him and to his son ‘we owe the tradition
of disinterested public service’. But at what price? Mr.
Murry believes that the ideals of Dr. Arnold have been de-
graded and adulterated by a subsequent generation: I

80

NOTES

would like to be sure that the results were not implicit in.
the principles. To me there appear to be further possible
results. Mr. Murry says ‘The main organ of this new
national and Christian society is the state; the state is, indeed,
the organ indispensable to its manifestation. For this reason
it is inevitable that in the new national society, if it is to be
in some real sense a Christian society, the Church and the
state should draw together. On the nature of this drawing
together of Church and state, everything depends.’

This paragraph, especially in conjunction with Mr.
Murry’s suggestion that the public schools should be taken
over by the state, makes me suspect that Mr. Murry is
ready to go a long way towards totalitarianism; and with-
out any explicit statement on his part about the Christian
beliefs which are necessary for salvation, or about the
supernatural reality of the Church, we might even con-
clude that he would go some way in the direction of an
English National Religion, the formulation of which
would be taken in hand by the moral re-armament manu-
facturers.

Mr. Murry appears (p. in) to follow Dr. Arnold in
attaching little importance to the apostolical succession.
With regard to the position of Matthew Arnold, he says
(p. 125) ‘In this situation no mere revival of Christian
piety could possibly avail: not even a rebirth of Christian
saintliness (such as he admired in Newman) could be effica-
cious against it.’ It is only a short step from employing
the adjective mere to ignoring Christian piety. He continues
‘What was required was a renovation of Christian under-
standing, an enlarged conception of the spiritual life itself.’

F 81

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY

How such an enlargement of the conception of the spiri-
tual life is to take place without spiritual masters, without
the rebirth of saintliness, I cannot conceive.

P. 58. Wave of revivalism. ‘Moral re-armament’ has
been competently and authoritatively analysed from the
theological point of view by Fr. Hilary Carpenter, O.P., in
the April 1939 issue of Blackfriars , and by Professor H. A.
Hodges in the May issue of Theology. But I feel that every-
thing that remains of clear thinking in this country should
be summoned to protest against this abuse of Christianity
and of English. A reading of Mr. H. W. Austin s compila-
tion Moral Re-Armament suggests several lines of thought.
Our immediate reflection is upon the extraordinary facility
with which men of the greatest eminence will lend their
names to any public appeal, however obscure or ambiguous.
Another thought is that the kind of mental activity ex-
posed by these letters must have a very demoralising effect
upon the language. Coleridge remarked that c in a language
like ours, where so many words are derived from other
languages, there are few modes of instruction more useful
or more amusing than that of accustoming young people
to seek for the etymology, or primary meaning, of the
words they use. There are cases, in which more knowledge
of more value may be conveyed by the history of a word,
than by the history of a campaign/ For instance, in a letter
to The Times reprinted in Mr. Austin’s pamphlet, it is
said that national security at home and abroad can only
be gained through moral regeneration’. Even allowing
that 4 moral regeneration’ is intended to represent some

82

NOTES

milder form of parturition than regeneration, it is a very
striking adaptation of the words of the Gospel to declare
that unless a nation be born again it cannot achieve
national security. The word regeneration appears to have
degenerated. In the next paragraph ‘regeneration’ has
been replaced by ‘re-armament’. I do not doubt that the
term ‘moral and spiritual re-armament’ was originally
coined merely as a striking reminder that we need some-
thing more than material equipment, but it has quickly
shrunk to imply another kind of equipment on the same
plane : that is, for ends which need be no better than worldly.

In spite of the fervour which tinges the whole corres-
pondence, I cannot find anything to suggest that Chris-
tianity is needed. Some of the signers, at least, I know to be
Christians, but the movement in itself, to judge by this
pamphlet, is no more essentially Christian than the German
National Religion of Professor Hauer. I have no first-hand
experience of the Buchmanite Movement, by which this
pamphlet appears to be inspired, but I have never seen any
evidence that to be a Buchmanite it was necessary to hold
the Christian Faith according to the Creeds, and until I
have seen a statement to that effect, I shall continue to doubt
whether there is any reason to call Buchmanism a Chris-
tian movement.

I am alarmed, by what are not necessary implications,
but are certainly possibilities, and to my mind probabilities,
of further development of this kind. It is the possibility of
gradually adapting our religion to fit our secular aims —
some of which may be worthy aims, but none of which will
be criticised by a supernatural measure. Moral re-arma-

F 2 83

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
ment in my opinion may easily lead to a progressive Ger-
manisation of our society. We observe the efficiency of the
German machine, and we perceive that we cannot emulate
it without a kind of religious enthusiasm. Moral re-arma-
ment will provide the enthusiasm, and be the most useful
kind of political drug — that is to say, having the potency
at once of a stimulant and a narcotic: but it will supply this
function to the detriment of our religion.

‘There is a tendency, especially among the English-
speaking Protestant peoples, to treat religion as a kind of
social tonic that can be used in times of national emergency
in order to extract a further degree of moral effort from the
people. But apart from the Pelagian conception of religion
that this view implies, it is not wholly sound from the
psychological point of view, since it merely heightens the
amount of moral tension without increasing the sources of
spiritual vitality or resolving the psychological conflicts
from which the society suffers.’

Christopher Dawson: Beyond Politics , p. 21.

‘While the humanistic religious sentiment which ex-
presses itself by the catch in the throat at the last Evensong
in the old School Chapel, the community singing of Abide
with me at a torchlight tattoo, and the standing to attention
during the Two Minutes’ Silence, can be utilised by totali-
tarianism, a religion which speaks of redemption by the
incarnate Son of God, which offers mankind the sacra-
mental means of union with the eternal life of the God-
Man Jesus Christ, and which makes the perpetual repre-
sentation of His atoning Sacrifice its essential act of worship

84

NOTES

must be the declared enemy of all who see in the state the
be-all and end-all of man’s life.’

Humphrey Beevor: Peace and Pacifism, p. 207.

P. 64 . 1 have permission to reprint, from The Times of
October 5, 1938, the following letter, which might serve
either as prologue or epilogue to all that I have said, and
which provided the immediate stimulus for the lectures
which form this book.

3 rd October, 1938.
Sir,

The lessons which are being drawn from the unforget-
table experiences through which we have lived during the
past few days do not for the most part seem to me to go
deep enough. The period of grac e that has been given us may
be no more than a postponement of the day of reckoning
unless we make up our minds to seek a radical cure. Our
civilisation can recover only if we are determined to root
out the cancerous growths which have brought it to the
verge of complete collapse. Whether truth and justice or
caprice and violence are to prevail in human affairs is a
question on which the fate of mankind depends. But to
equate the conflict between these opposing forces with the
contrast between democracies and dictatorships, real and
profound as is this difference, is a dangerous simplification
of the problem. To focus our attention on evil in others is a
way of escape from the painful struggle of eradicating it
from our own hearts and lives and an evasion of our real
responsibilities.

The basal truth is that the spiritual foundations of western

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THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
civilisation have been undermined. The systems which are
in the ascendant on the continent may be regarded from
one point of view as convulsive attempts to arrest the pro-
cess of disintegration. What clear alternative have we in
this country? The mind of England is confused and un-
certain. Is it possible that a simple question, an affirmative
answer to which is for many a matter of course and for
many others an idle dream or sheer lunacy, might in these
circumstances become a live and serious issue? May our
salvation lie in an attempt to recover our Christian heritage,
not in the sense of going back to the past but of discovering
in the central affirmations and insights of the Christian faith
new spiritual energies to regenerate and vitalise our sick
society? Does not the public repudiation of the whole
Christian scheme of life in a large part of what was once
known as Christendom force to the front the question
whether the path of wisdom is not rather to attempt to
work out a Christian doctrine of modern society and to
order our national life in accordance with it?

Those who would give a quick, easy or confident answer
to this question have failed to understand it. It cannot even
be seriously considered without a profound awareness of
the extent to which Christian ideas have lost their hold over,
or faded from the consciousness of, large sections of the
population; of the far-reaching changes that would be
called for in the structure, institutions and activities of
existing society, which is in many of its features a complete
denial of the Christian understanding of the meaning and
end of man’s existence; and of the stupendous and cosdy
spiritual, moral and intellectual effort that any genuine

86

NOTES

attempt to order the national life in accordance with the
Christian understanding of life would demand. Realistical-
ly viewed the task is so far beyond the present capacity of
our British Christianity that I write as a fool. But if the will
were there, I believe that the first steps to be taken are
fairly clear. The presupposition of all else, however, is the
recognition that nothing short of a really heroic effort will
avail to save mankind from its present evils and the de-
struction which must follow in their train.

I am, Sir,

Yours etc.

(Signed) j. h. oldham

POSTSCRIPT

A distinguished theologian, who has been so kind as to
read the proofs of this book, has made criticisms of
which I should have liked to avail myself by a thorough
revision of the text. He has allowed me to quote the fol-
lowing passage from his criticism, which the reader may
find helpful in correcting some of the defects of my
presentation:

‘The main theses of this book seem to me so important,
and their application so urgently necessary, that I want to
call attention to two points which I think need further
emphasis, lest the point of the argument should be missed.

‘A main part of the problem, as regards the actual
Church and its existing members, is the defective realisa-
tion among us of the fundamental fact that Christianity is
primarily a Gospel-message, a dogma, a belief about God
" 87

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
and the world and man, which demands of man a response
of faith and repentance. The common failure lies in putting
the human response first, and so thinking of Christianity
as primarily a religion. Consequently there is among us a
tendency to view the problems of the day in the light of
what is practically possible, rather than in the light of what
is imposed by the principles of that truth to which the
Church is set to bear witness.

‘Secondly, there is a general vagueness about “the Com-
munity of Christians”. I fear the phrase will be interpreted
to mean nice Christianly-minded people of the upper
middle class (p. 61). But the Community of Christians
ought to mean those who are gathered into unity in the
sacramental life of the visible Church: and this community
in the life of faith ought to be producing something of a
common mind about the questions of the day. It cannot
indeed be assumed that the mind of the Co mmuni ty of
Christians is truly reflected in the ecclesiastical pronounce-
ments which from time to time appear: that mind does not
form itself quickly, in these matters in which it is so hard
to see the way. There ought however to be, and to some
real extent there is now, in the minds of Christian people a
sense of the proportion of things and a spirit of discipline,
which are direct fruits of the life of faith: and it is these that
need to be brought to bear if the questions are to be
answered in the light of Christian principles.’

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APPENDIX

The following broadcast talk, delivered in February 1937
in a series on * Church , Community and State , and printed
in ‘ The Listener , has some relevance to the matter of the
preceding pages of this book.

APPENDIX

T hat there is an antithesis between the Church and the
World is a belief we derive from the highest authori-
ty. We know also from our reading of history, that a cer-
tain tension between Church and State is desirable. When
Church and State fall out completely, it is ill with the com-
monwealth; and when Church and State get on too well
together, there is something wrong with the Church. But
the distinction between the Church and the World is not
so easy to draw as that between Church and State. Here we
mean not any one communion or ecclesiastical organisation
but the whole number of Christians as Christians; and we
mean not any particular State, but the whole of society,
the world over, in its secular aspect. The antithesis is not
simply between two opposed groups of individuals: every
individual is himself a field in which the forces of the
Church and the world struggle.

By ‘the Church’s message to the World’ you might
think that what was meant was only the business of the
Church to go on talking. I should like to make it more
urgent by expanding the title to ‘the Church’s business to
interfere with the World’. What is often assumed, and it is
a principle that I wish to oppose, is the principle of live-and-
let-live. It is assumed that if the State leaves the Church

9i

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
alone, and to some extent protects it from molestation, then
the Church has no right to interfere with the organisation
of society, or with the conduct of those who deny its beliefs.
It is assumed that any such interference would be the oppres-
sion of the majority by a minority. Christians must take a
very different view of their duty. But before suggesting
how the Church should interfere with the World, we must
try to answer the question: why should it interfere with the
World?

It must be said bluntly that between the Church and the
World there is no permanent modus vivendi possible. We
may unconsciously draw a false analogy between the posi-
tion of the Church in a secular society and the position of a
dissenting sect in a Christian society. The situation is very
different. A dissenting minority in a Christian society can
persist because of the fundamental beliefs it has in common
with that society, because of a common morality and of
common grounds of Christian action. Where there is a
different morality there is conflict. I do not mean that the
Church exists primarily for the propagation of Christian
morality: morality is a means and not an end. The Church
exists for the glory of God and the sanctification of souls:
Christian morality is part of the means by which these ends
are to be attained. But because Christian morals are based
on fixed beliefs which cannot change they also are essential-
ly unchanging: while the beliefs and in consequence the
morality of the secular world can change from individual
to individual, or from generation to generation, or from
nation to nation. To accept two ways of life in the same
society, one for the Christian and another for the rest,
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APPENDIX

would be for the Church to abandon its task of evangelising
the world. For the more alien the non-Christian world be-
comes, the more difficult becomes its conversion.

The Church is not merely for the elect — in other words,
those whose temperament brings them to that belief and
that behaviour. Nor does it allow us to be Christian in
some social relations and non-Christian in others. It wants
everybody, and it wants each individual as a whole. It
therefore must struggle for a condition of society which
will give the maximum of opportunity for us to lead
wholly Christian lives, and the maximum of opportunity
for others to become Christians. It maintains the paradox
that while we are each responsible for our own souls, we
are all responsible for all other souls, who are, like us, on
their way to a future state of heaven or hell. And — another
paradox — as the Christian attitude towards peace, happiness
and well-being of peoples is that they are a means and not
and end in themselves, Christians are more deeply com-
mitted to realising these ideals than are those who regard
them as ends in themselves.

Now, how is the Church to interfere in die World? I do
not propose to take up the rest of my time by denouncing
Fascism and Communism. This task has been more ably
performed by others, and the conclusions may be taken for
granted. By pursuing this charge, I might obtain from you
a kind of approval that I do not want. I suspect that a good
deal of the dislike of these philosophies in this country is due
to the wrong reasons as well as the right, and is coloured
with complacency and sanctimony. It is easy, safe and

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THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
pleasant to criticise foreigners; and it has the advantage of
distracting attention from the evils of our own society. We
must distinguish also between our opposition to ideas and
our disapproval of practices. Both Fascism and Communism
have fundamental ideas which are incompatible with
Christianity. But in practice, a Fascist or a Communist
State might realise its idea more or less, and it might be
more or less tolerable. And on the other hand, the practices,
or others equally objectionable, might easily intrude them-
selves into a society nominally attached to quite different
principles. We need not assume that our form of constitu-
tional democracy is the only one suitable for a Christian
people, or that it is in itself a guarantee against an anti-
Christian world. Instead of merely condemning Fascism
and Communism, therefore, we might do well to consider
that we also live in a mass-civilisation following many
wrong ambitions and wrong desires, and that if our society
renounces completely its obedience to God, it will become
no better, and possible worse, than some of those abroad
which are popularly execrated.

By ‘the world’, then, I mean for my present purpose
particularly the world in this island. The influence of the
Church can be exerted in several ways. It may oppose, or it
may support, particular actions at particular times. It is
acclaimed when it supports any cause that is already
assured of a good deal of secular support: it is attacked,
quite naturally, when it opposes anything that people think
they want. Whether people say that the Church ought to
interfere, or whether they say it ought to mind its own
business, depends mostly on whether they agree or dis-

94

APPENDIX

agree with its attitude upon the issue of the moment. A very
difficult problem arises whenever there is occasion for the
Church to resist any innovation — either in legislation or in
social practice — which is contrary to Christian principles.
To those who deny, or do not fully accept, Christian doc-
trine, or who wish to interpret it according to their private
lights such resistance often appears oppressive. To the un-
reasoning mind the Church can often be made to appear to
be the enemy of progress and enlightenment. The Church
may not always be strong enough to resist successfully: but
I do not see how it can ever accept as a permanent settle-
ment one law for itself and another for the world.

I do not wish, however, to pursue the question of the
kinds of issue which may arise from time to time. I want to
suggest that a task for the Church in our age is a more pro-
found scrutiny of our society, which shall start from the
question: to what depth is the foundation of our society
not merely neutral but positively anti-Christian?

It ought not to be necessary for me to insist that the final
aims of the churchman, and the aims of the secular re-
former, are very different. So far as the aims of the latter
are for true social justice, they ought to be comprehended
in those of the former. But one reason why the lot of the
secular reformer or revolutionist seems to me to be the
easier is this: that for the most part he conceives of the evils
of the world as something external to himself. They are
thought of either as completely impersonal, so that there is
nothing to alter but machinery; or if there is evil incarnate,
it is always incarnate in the other people — a class, a race, the ’
politicians, the bankers, the armament makers, and so forth

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THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
— never in oneself. There are individual exceptions: but so
far as a man sees the need for converting himself as well as
the World, he is approximating to the religious point of
view. But for most people, to be able to simplify issues so as
to see only the definite external enemy, is extremely ex-
hilarating, and brings about the bright ey e and the sprin gy
stepjhat go so well with the political uniform. This is an
exhilaration that the Christian must deny himsel f. It comes
from an artificial stimulant bound to have bad after-affects.

k

It causes pride, either individual or collective, and pride
brings its own doom. For only in humility, charity and
purity — a nd most of all perhaps humility — can we be pre-
pared to receive the grace of God without which human
operations are vain.

It is not enough simply to see the evil and injustice and
suffering of this world, and precipitate oneself into action.
We must know, what only theology can tell us, why these
things are wrong. Otherwise, we may right some wrongs
at the cost of creating new ones. If this is a world in which
I, and the majority of my fellow-beings, live in that je er-
petual dist raction from Go d which exposes us to the one
great peril, that of final and complete alienation from God
after death, there is some wrong that I must try to help to
put right. If there is any profound immorality to which we
are all committed as a condition of living in society at all,
that is a matter of the gravest concern to the Church. I am
neither a sociologist nor an economist, and in any case it
would be inappropriate, in this context, to produce any
formula for setting the world right. It is much more the

96

APPENDIX

business of the Church to say what is wrong, that is, what
is inconsistent with Christian doctrine, than to propose
particular schemes of improvement. What i s right enters
the realm of the expedient and is contingent upon place and
time, the degree of culture, the temperament of a people.
But the Church can say what is always and everywhere
wrong. And without this firm assurance of first principles
which it is the business of the Church to repeat in and out
of season, the World will constantly confuse the right with
the expedient. In a society based on the use of slave labour
men tried to prove from the Bible that slavery was some-
thing ordained by God. For most people, the actual con-
stitution of Society, or that which their more generous
passions wish to bring about, is right, and Christianity
must be adapted to it. But the Church cannot be, in any
political sense, either conservative, or liberal, or revolu-
tionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the
wrong things; liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolu-
tion a denial of the permanent things.

Perhaps the dominant vice of our time, from the point
of view of the Church, will be proved to be Avarice. Surely
there is something wrong in our attitude towards money.
The acquisitive, rather than the creative and spiritual in-
stincts, are encouraged. The fact that money is always forth-
coming for the purpose of making more money, whilst it
is so difficult to obtain for purposes of exchange, and for
the needs of the most needy, is disturbing to those who are
not economists. I am by no means sure that it is right for
me to improve my income by investing in the shares of a
company, making I know not what, operating perhaps

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THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
thousands of miles away, and in the control of which I
have no effective voice — but which is recommended as a
sound investment. I am still less sure of the morality of my
being a moneylender: that is, of investing in bonds and
debentures. I know that it is wrong for me to speculate:
but where the line is to be drawn between speculation and
what is called legitimate investment is by no means clear.
I seem to be a petty usurer in a world manipulated largely
by big usurers. And I know that the Church once con-
demned these things. And I believe that modern war is
chiefly caused by some immorality of competition which
is always with us in times of ‘peace’; and that until this evil
is cured, no leagues or disarmaments or collective security
or conferences or conventions or treaties will suffice to
prevent it.

Any machinery, however beautiful to look at and how-
ever wonderful a product of brains and skill, can be used
for bad purposes as well as good: and this is as true of social
machinery as of constructions of steel. I think that, more
important than the invention of a new machine, is the
creation of a temper of mind in people such that they can
learn to use a new machine rightly. More important still at
the moment would be the diffusion of knowledge of what
is wrong — morally wrong — and of why it is wrong. We are
all dissatisfied with the way in which the world is con-
ducted: some believe that it is a misconduct in which we all
have some complicity; some believe that if we trust our-
selves entirely to politics, sociology or economics we shall
only shuffle from one makeshift to another. And here is the
perpetual message of the Church: to affirm, to teach and to

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APPENDIX

apply, true theology. We cannot be satisfied to be Chris-
tians at our devotions and merely secular reformers all the
rest of the week, for there is one question that we need to
ask ourselves every day and about whatever business. The
Church has perpetually to answer this question: to what
purpose were we bom? What is the end of Man?

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